Astral Codex Ten

Organizations: A

1975 min read

Organizations: A

Groups, collectives, magazines, venues, and institutions operating inside the scene. This section collects the A slice of the category index.

Reference Index

Use the title to open the reference entry. Use the caret to expand a compact inline dossier with source context, issue trail, related pages, and outbound links.

ACX151 mentions across 151 issues

ACX is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 151 times across 151 issues between April 08, 2021 and April 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous"; "there are still ACX online meetups"; "every subreddit is its own echo culture hangout (so is ACX!)". It most often appears alongside Scott, Discord, Astralcodexten Com.

Article page
ACX
Mention count
151
Issue count
151
First seen
April 08, 2021
Last seen
April 06, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.
Inline links: 1
They almost never ask for money, and lawyers only get involved in the most exceptional circumstances (the author found two instances of that happening). When someone does need to pay a debt, he does so in kind: “Should your goat happen to eat your neighbor’s tomatoes, the neighborly thing for you to do would be to help replant the tomatoes; a transfer of money would be too cold and too impersonal.”2 Ranchers do keep rough mental account of debits and credits, but they allow these to be settled long term and over multiple fronts. A debt of “he refused to help with our mutual fence” might be paid with “but he did look after my place while I was on holiday”.
Inline links: 2
(This is how ranchers deal with each other. Ranchette3 owners will also sometimes complain to public officials, who in turn talk to the cattle owner. They’ll sometimes file damage claims against the rancher’s insurance. It’s ranchette owners who are responsible for range closure petitions.)
Inline links: 3
Open Thread 168
April 19, 2021 · Original source
2: Comments of the week from the blog are Erusian on the different accounts of Caesar’s death, plus Deiseach with other wacky Caesar-related stories. Also, from the Progress and Poverty discussion, why real estate is so expensive in some third world countries, and a subthread on least disruptive ways to institute a land value tax.
Inline links: Erusian on the different accounts of Caesar’s death, other wacky Caesar-related stories, why real estate is so expensive in some third world countries, least disruptive ways to institute a land value tax
Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
April 22, 2021 · Original source
[This is the fourth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA]
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
How did the counterculture eventually win, and the patriotic/Christian amalgam civil religion of the 1950s - 1990s eventually collapse? I don’t have a great understanding of this (though see Part III here), and I’d love to learn more so I can develop a real game plan. Where is the cultural-change equivalent of Progress Studies, and what might we be able to do if we had it?
Inline links: here
Gradually throughout the 2000s this transitioned to "echo culture", where people hung out in ideologically sorted communities and discussed things from a shared perspective. At its worst, this was straight outrage culture; some blogger on DailyKos would write about the latest awful thing Dubya said, and hundreds of commenters would compete to demonstrate just how much they hate him. But at its best, it was about building communities of likeminded people, having a space where you felt safe expressing yourself, refining shared views, and letting off steam. Echo culture isn't necessarily evil - basically every subreddit is its own echo culture hangout (so is ACX!) and many of them are great. But it took a lot of culture shock to make it work.
Open Thread 174
May 30, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
ACX Reader Research Survey: Call For Submissions
June 25, 2021 · Original source
Now that the book review contest is winding down, I want to start another big project: the ACX Reader Research Survey.
If you're a researcher (professional or amateur) who wants to ask questions to the ACX readership, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com, by July 10, with:
Open Thread 179
July 04, 2021 · Original source
2: Comment of the week is Gene Smith on polygenic screening, especially the attempt to calculate cost-effectiveness. "My overall conclusion is that if we somehow end up banning pre-implantation genetic testing it will be one of the worst decisions we have ever made. The impact would be on-par with a worldwide ban on vaccines or sewage systems. It would likely cost the average person around 5 years of healthy life." And many people brought up this anti-screening New England Journal of Medicine article that came out the same day as my post, although I can't find a good unpaywalled link.
Inline links: Gene Smith on polygenic screening, anti-screening
Please Take The Reader Survey [Update: Now It Is Closed And You Can Stop Taking It]
July 16, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 183
August 01, 2021 · Original source
3: The rationalist community is always experimenting with new institutions, and now we're trying an old one - official community matchmaker. My friend Elena has stepped up to the plate and is doing good work interviewing lots of people about their preferences and trying to set them up on dates with other people she's interviewed (poly vs. mono is optional, she has good matches available in both categories). She finds we need more of three particular demographics: men who want kids, women who don't necessarily want kids, and people who are open to dating a transgender partner. If you fall into one of these three groups, we're expanding the definition of "rationalist community" wide enough to cover you as an ACX reader, whether you identify as "rationalist" in any other way or not, and you’re eligible for Elena’s (free) service. Consider checking out her website ; she'll also be around to answer any questions in the comments here. Currently most available matches are in the SF Bay Area, so though in theory the service isn't geographically limited she'll probably be best positioned to help people who live near there. [EDIT: All Elena’s free appointments are now full, she is trying to figure out some kind of better business model, you can sign up for her wait list if you want]
Inline links: her website
(Outdoor, Careful) Meetups Everywhere 2021 - Seeking Organizers
August 10, 2021 · Original source
According to the recent surveys, 97% of ACX readers in the US are vaccinated. Other developed countries have roughly similar numbers (except for Australia, where I am recommending no meetups for now). I will request that only vaccinated people attend these meetups - but knowing that I can’t enforce this, it makes me reassured to learn that almost everyone is vaccinated anyway.
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX outdoor meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 170 cities around the world, including beautiful Lusk, Wyoming (population: 1,526). You can see the full list here, and I’ll also have it below in case you can’t access the spreadsheet for some reason.
Inline links: request for, You can see the full list here
GDAŃSK, POLAND (RSVP) Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 18 Location: Park Akademicki opposite the Opera Bałtycka Coordinates: https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans
OMAHA, NE (RSVP) Contact: TracingWoodgrains, tracingwoodgrains[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, August 28 Location: Memorial Park - We will be near the white stone monument at the center of the park. I'll be wearing jeans and a black polo, carrying a sign with ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/ashes.salt.green Notes: I've arranged a meetup before, but never in Omaha, and to be frank I don't know if there are more than one or two other ACX readers there, so this meetup is an experimental roll of the dice to see if anyone will show. I encourage interested parties to email me so I can get a sense of how many people to expect.
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/ashes.salt.green
Paris Meetups This Weekend
October 07, 2021 · Original source
2: And Paris meetup this Sunday, October 10, 5 PM, at rotonde.tartiner.éloigner, aka the top of Trocadero park, West of Musée de l'Homme, near the pond, here . There should be a big ACX sign. Please feel free to come to either of these even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc, etc, etc. Mingyuan has added a Bangkok meetup, so if you’re in Thailand check it out. And regardless of where you are, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.
Inline links: rotonde.tartiner.éloigner, here, the spreadsheet
Links For October
October 14, 2021 · Original source
7: Pain reprocessing therapy, a series of explanations and exercises intended to help chronic pain patients realize that their pain is psychogenic, seems strongly effective against chronic pain in new study. As with all niche therapies, I am skeptical that more than a tiny fraction of people with chronic pain will be able to access it unless it gets turned into an app (preferably not a prescription-gated $1000 one) - but if people could access it, the effects could be huge. Though for the bear case, see @literalbanana, and yes, your default assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an excuse not to give you necessary medications”:
Inline links: seems strongly effective against chronic pain in new study, preferably not
13: Latest salvo in the “was colonialism good/bad for economic development?” debate - areas of India that were under direct British colonial rule have 39% less nighttime illumination (a common proxy for developedness) than areas that maintained more local autonomy. Although there are probably confounders in terms of which areas the British directly annexed, these are more likely to strengthen the case than weaken it - the British annexed the most productive areas, and a subanalysis based on areas where annexation/non-annexation depended on quirks of royals dying shows stronger effects than the original finding. [EDIT: See this comment for skepticism]
Inline links: have 39% less nighttime illumination, this comment
12: I’ve previously written some stuff on why various groups (including ACX readers) seem to be disproportionately firstborn children. One puzzle piece (pun not intended) I’d missed is that firstborns are more likely to have autism. Here’s a study showing that this is not just reproductive stoppage (ie once parents have an autistic child, they’re overwhelmed and don’t have any m/ore kids). If firstborn-ness shifts every child a little bit further onto the autism spectrum, maybe that would explain firstborn overrepresentation in STEM groups, like ACX readers and Nobel laureates in physics. If some college student is looking for a psychology undergrad thesis project, I would love to see them survey several classes and see whether the humanities people have different birth order proportions than the STEM people.
Inline links: firstborns are more likely to have autism, a study, Nobel laureates in physics.
Open Thread 200
November 28, 2021 · Original source
3: Comment of the week is Gwern on whether we should consider China “successful”:"
Inline links: Gwern on
4: Dr. Bitterman, one of the researchers who came up with the ivermectin-effects-are-from-worms hypothesis, is defending his idea from some of the concerns you guys brought up in the comments. For example, in response to a comment that hyperinfection syndrome is rare, he writes:
Inline links: you guys brought up in the comments, writes
1: Thanks to the 600 (!) of you who sent in ACX grants applications. I’d complained earlier that there weren’t many good ones, but I was being impatient - now I have the opposite problem, way too many good ones to fund or evaluate easily. I’ll be sending out emails to those of you who offered to help fund or judge applications in a few days to a week, after I’ve come up with a strategy. Probably results will be announced towards the end of the window I committed to on the original post, so around Christmas time. Please bear with me during the inevitable snafus in trying to set this process up.
Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
BLOG 77. ACX is making more than $400K: 80% 78. ...more than $500K: 50% 79. ...more than $600K: 30% 80. At least one post gets more than 300 likes: 80% 81. I run another Book Review Contest: 90% 82. I go to at least 6 meetups in 6 different cities: 60% 83. I run a survey or am extremely prepared to run one in January: 80% 84. I finally finish posting the analysis of the remaining birth order results: 60% 85. I run another ACX Grants round with at least $100,000 moved: 70% 86. I add at least two more dictators to the Book Club: 80% 87. I’m still the top-ranked blog in Substack’s “Science” category: 70%
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
Inline links: ACX Grants
When you’re done with these, you can now find the second half of the list here.
Inline links: here
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
Inline links: ACX Grants
You can find the first 66 of these here.
Inline links: here
#78: Research Questions In Progress Studies With funding from ACX Grants I will investigate a set of specific and crucial open questions for Progress Studies: What is our capacity to slow technological progress if desired? What are general properties of technology which limit or exacerbate existential risk? How robust are recommendations to different sets of moral ethics? These are crucial to understanding the importance of accelerating progress, but relatively little effort has been devoted to these questions outside of AppliedDivinityStudies’ The Moral Foundation of Progress, and my own Stubborn Attachments From Behind The Veil. In the past, I’ve interned on economic policy at the CATO Institute and The Charter Cities Institute where I published on growth and governance. ADS has also agreed to mentor me over the summer, and provides a vote of confidence. If you’re able to provide funding, please email maxwell.tabarrok@gmail.com.
Open Thread 211
February 13, 2022 · Original source
1: The team behind Polymarket want me to clarify that despite the tone of my post about them they do still exist, they’re open for real-market trading outside the US, and they might have some kind of compliant US product in the future. I apologize for inadvertently implying they were dead.
Inline links: my post about them
3: Related: ACX Grants recipient Nuno Sempere somehow got grant money of his own and is giving out $10K in prediction market related microgrants. Apply here if interested.
Inline links: Apply here
"We have some plans to compare (aggregates of) ACX reader predictions against various prediction markets. But there are probably much cooler things we can do which we haven't thought of yet! If you run a prediction market and have an idea for an interesting collaboration that involves sharing our data before it's publicly released, get in touch with us through the contest feedback form. If you don't run a prediction market but still have an idea for something interesting we can do with the contest data, also feel free to suggest it in the feedback form, but we probably won't share the contest data with you."
Inline links: contest feedback form
Austin Meetup Correction
February 25, 2022 · Original source
As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
Since I’m claiming the right to judge others, it’s fair to ask how I performed. The answer is: medium! On my Predictions For 2022, posted January 31, I said there was a 50-50 chance of a “major flare-up in the Russia/Ukraine conflict” this year (obviously this qualifies). Later, I quoted Matt Yglesias’ prediction (40% chance of Russia invading Ukraine) and said HOLD, ie I didn’t disagree in either direction. A charitable person would interpret that as me saying there was a 50% chance of a major flare-up, of which 10% was a “flare-up” short of full invasion, and 40% was invasion. In reality, I just forgot I’d assigned a higher probability to that statement earlier and consulted an extremely vague mental model where 50% sounded right but 40% also sounded right. So I assigned an invasion somewhere between 40-50% probability on January 31. Most prediction markets were also around that level then (Metaculus was 44%). I didn’t let myself check markets when making my prediction, but I’d probably glanced at them before. In any case, I made the conservative prediction of “yeah, fine, whatever everyone else is saying”.
Inline links: Predictions For 2022
I made a small amount of fake money and a smaller amount of real money betting “YES” on a few prediction markets, after writing this post and being annoyed that they seemed too low, but this was just arbitrage, not a real opinion.
Inline links: this post
A bunch of leftists - Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald - failed because they couldn’t believe that warmongering intelligence officials trying to scare everyone about Russia had a point. They admittedly had great heuristics: there are lots of warmongers, our intelligence community has been really wrong lots of times before, and the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia. Unfortunately, the relevant Less Wrong post here is Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, and the relevant ACX post is Heuristics That Almost Always Work, so they failed.
Inline links: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, Heuristics That Almost Always Work
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
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22
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post April 18:
Inline links: my last post
Open Thread 225
May 23, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 226
May 30, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 231
July 04, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 233
July 18, 2022 · Original source
4: Thanks to everyone who applied last week to Spencer Greenberg’s grants round. It is closing soon, and I won’t be doing another ACX Grants for at least a few months, but if any of you want to pursue urgent opportunities in AI alignment, biosecurity, or similar fields before then, and find that some 4-5 digit amount of money would help, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I will try to connect you to relevant funders.
Open Thread 234
July 25, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: I finally went through the past three months of reported comments and banned people who needed banning. New bans for Brett S, Karl, Sleazy E, JSTR (3 months), Adept, Cal Lawson, Charles Casaburi, Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah, HumbleRando, Deiseach (1 month), and NavyBlueSmoke. New major warnings (halfway to ban) for JDK, истинец, Roger Biles, Ludex, Trebuchet, and Golden_Feather. New minor warning for Beowulf888.
Inline links: Brett S, Karl, Sleazy E, JSTR, Adept, Charles Casaburi, Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah, HumbleRando, Deiseach, NavyBlueSmoke, JDK, истинец, Roger Biles, Ludex, Trebuchet, Golden_Feather, Beowulf888
3: I might or might not get around to writing a Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism, but I at least want to point to this comment by Remmett, author of the criticism post I pointed to as too vague, where he explains more about what he was trying to do and how I got it wrong.
Inline links: this comment by Remmett
Absurdity Bias, Neom Edition
August 04, 2022 · Original source
Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom.
Inline links: expresses concern, on Neom
Can I convince you to read the sequences? There are some real underappreciated classics. (excerpt edited to remove examples that someone would misinterpret and start a flame war over) Here’s a possible argument why not: everything has to bottom out in absurdity arguments at some level or another. Suppose I carefully calculated that, with modern construction techniques, building Neom would cost 10x more than its allotted budget. This argument contains an implied premise: “and the Saudis can’t construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else”. How do we know the Saudis can’t construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else? The argument itself doesn’t prove this; it’s just left as too absurd to need justification. Suppose I did want to address this objection. For example, I carefully researched existing construction projects in Saudi Arabia, checked how cheap they were, calculated how much they could cut costs using every trick available to them, and found it was less than 10x? My argument still contains the implied premise “there’s no Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world”. But this is another absurdity heuristic - I have no argument beyond that such a conspiracy would be absurd. I might eventually be able to come up with an argument supporting this, but that argument, too, would have implied premises depending on absurdity arguments. So how far down this chain should I go? One plausible answer is “just stop at the first level where your interlocutors accept your absurdity argument”. Anyone here think Neom’s a good idea? No? Even Alexandros agrees it probably won’t work. So maybe this is the right level of absurdity. If I was pitching my post towards people who mostly thought Neom was a good idea, then I might try showing that it would cost 10x more than its expected budget, and see whether they agreed with me that Saudis being able to construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else was absurd. If they did agree with me, then I’ve hit the right level of argument. And if they agree with me right away, before I make any careful calculations, then it was fine for me to just point to it and gesture “That’s absurd!” I think this is basically the right answer for communications questions, like how to structure a blog post. When I criticize communicators for relying on the absurdity heuristic too much, it’s because they’re claiming to adjudicate a question with people on both sides, but then retreating to absurdity instead. When I was young a friend recommended me a pseudoscience book on ESP, with lots of pseudoscientific studies proving ESP was real. I looked for skeptical rebuttals, and they were all “Ha ha! ESP? That’s absurd, you morons!” These people were just clogging up Google search results that could have been giving me real arguments. But if nobody has ever heard of Neom, and I expect my readers to immediately agree that Neom is absurd, then it’s fine (in a post describing Neom rather than debating it) to stop at the first level. (I do worry that it might be creating an echo chamber; people start out thinking Neom is a bad idea for the obvious reasons, then read my post and think “and ACX also thinks it’s a bad idea” is additional evidence; I think my obligation here is to not exaggerate the amount of thought that went into my assessment, which I hope I didn’t.) But the absurdity bias isn’t just about communication. What about when I’m thinking things through in my head, alone? I’m still going to be asking questions like “is Neom possible?” and having to decide what level of argument to stop at. To put it another way: which of your assumptions do you accept vs. question? Question none of your assumptions, and you’re a closed-minded bigot. Question all of your assumptions, and you get stuck in an infinite regress. The only way to escape (outside of a formal system with official axioms) is to just trust your own intuitive judgment at some point. So maybe you should just start out doing that. Except that some people seem to actually be doing something wrong. The guy who hears about evolution and says “I know that monkeys can’t turn into humans, this is so absurd that I don’t even have to think about the question any further” is doing something wrong. How do you avoid being that guy? Some people try to dodge the question and say that all rationality is basically a social process. Maybe on my own, I will naturally stop at whatever level seems self-evident to me. Then other people might challenge me, and I can reassess. But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are. It’s like answering a child’s question about how to do a math problem with “ask a grown-up”. A coward’s way out! Eliezer Yudkowsky gives his answer here: I can think of three major circumstances where the [useful] absurdity heuristic gives rise to a [bad] absurdity bias: The first case is when we have information about underlying laws which should override surface reasoning. If you know why most objects fall, and you can calculate how fast they fall, then your calculation that a helium balloon should rise at such-and-such a rate, ought to strictly override the absurdity of an object falling upward. If you can do deep calculations, you have no need for qualitative surface reasoning. But we may find it hard to attend to mere calculations in the face of surface absurdity, until we see the balloon rise. (In 1913, Lee de Forest was accused of fraud for selling stock in an impossible endeavor, the Radio Telephone Company: "De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public...has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company...") The second case is a generalization of the first - attending to surface absurdity in the face of abstract information that ought to override it. If people cannot accept that studies show that marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect, because it seems absurd - violating the surface rule that "medicine cures" - then I would call this "absurdity bias". There are many reasons that people may fail to attend to abstract information or integrate it incorrectly. I think it worth distinguishing cases where the failure arises from absurdity detectors going off. The third case is when the absurdity heuristic simply doesn't work - the process is not stable in its surface properties over the range of extrapolation - and yet people use it anyway. The future is usually "absurd" - it is unstable in its surface rules over fifty-year intervals. This doesn't mean that anything can happen. Of all the events in the 20th century that would have been "absurd" by the standards of the 19th century, not a single one - to the best of our knowledge - violated the law of conservation of energy, which was known in 1850. Reality is not up for grabs; it works by rules even more precise than the ones we believe in instinctively. The point is not that you can say anything you like about the future and no one can contradict you; but, rather, that the particular practice of crying "Absurd!" has historically been an extremely poor heuristic for predicting the future. Over the last few centuries, the absurdity heuristic has done worse than maximum entropy - ruled out the actual outcomes as being far too absurd to be considered. You would have been better off saying "I don't know". This is all true as far as it goes, but it’s still just rules for the rare situations when your intuitive judgments of absurdity are contradicted by clear facts that someone else is handing you on a silver platter. But how do you, pondering a question on your own, know when to stop because a line of argument strikes you as absurd, vs. to stick around and gather more facts and see whether your first impressions were accurate? I don’t have a great answer here, but here are some parts of a mediocre answer: Calibration training. Make predictions so you know how often you’re right vs. wrong about things. If the things you say only have a 1% chance of happening happen a third of the time, you know you’re stopping too soon when you make absurdity arguments.
Inline links: read the sequences, additional evidence, infinite regress, here, information about underlying laws which should override surface reasoning, fraud, studies show that marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect, The future is usually "absurd", law of conservation of energy, Calibration training
Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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. This contains spoilers for the Dune series. - SA]
Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers
August 16, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on The Scholar's Stage (a blog which I found through some link on ACX/SSC a while back.)
Inline links: The Scholar's Stage, ACX, SSC
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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.]
Open Thread 238
August 21, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Reminder that we are still looking for organizers for this year’s Meetups Everywhere, ie volunteer to host an ACX meetup in your city that will get signal-boosted on the blog. We seem to have had unusually few people apply this time around, so if you were on the fence, please sign up.
Inline links: looking for organizers for this year’s Meetups Everywhere, sign up
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 8FWR693H+GP2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our Facebook group. Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: 9F26RCWC+84 Event link(s): LessWrong SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: 8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: 8FQQRX38+V6W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: 8G6MM3M3+Q6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: 9F2P3CRW+FP7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: 9F7JMH38+GFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew_n_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: 9GF6CPRH+MQ Event link(s): LessWrong HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: 9GG65WMJ+2J Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong group FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: 8FW4CP32+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a Discord and a matrix server (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: 8FW4V86J+GH Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: 8FM3HCQW+9H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, https://twitter.com/lakesare Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: 8HH6MRQ2+WH Event link(s): LessWrong AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: 9F28Q3HJ+9Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP here so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: 9F4MG9H4+4X Event link(s): LessWrong, Google Calendar Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: 9F28WRMX+96H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: 8FV9XVV2+V56 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is an Open Street Map link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: 9F5FHX4H+RXC Event link(s): LessWrongLessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: 8FXC2C72+85X Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see our LessWrong page KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: 9F3F8F6X+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Telegram group Notes: Please join the Telegram group if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: 9F3J8CM2+PF Event link(s): LessWrong TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, 8FWFG3H5+XR). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: 8FWFG3H5+XR Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: 8G95WMQR+WRP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: 8FVXG2CW+2H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: 9C3HVGQ7+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, LessWrong profile Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: 9C5M8PRP+JV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, LW profile, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: 8FJJXP22+HC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: 8FQFF6C4+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: 8FQH9VXG+9J Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: 8FMGPC92+R44 Event link(s): LessWrong ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook, +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: 8FHJVHP9+8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: 9G86X426+Q5Q Event link(s): LessWrong AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: 9F469V89+W4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the Rationality NL Discord server. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 9F4629FG+66 Event link(s): LessWrong HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: 9F48F378+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our Discord server. Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: 9F37FMC5+VR Event link(s): LessWrong THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: 9F4638J3+GP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: 9FFGWPH7+QP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: 9F6W9JJ4+JW Event link(s): LessWrong KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: 9F2X2WVX+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet every month, here is our Facebook group. LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: 9G346HX8+FX Event link(s): LessWrong POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 9F4RCW5P+X3F Event link(s): LessWrong WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: 9G4362G8+2V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our Facebook group or Meetup.com. LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: 8CCGPRJW+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: 8GP8C2HM+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: 8GR5QH8F+MW Event link(s): LessWrong BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: 8GP2RCP7+G7 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: 8FWV44X9+XW8 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: 8FRP3F3X+6V Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: 8FH495QP+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: 8CGRC897+F8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: 8C9P92F6+3RG Event link(s): LessWrong GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: 9F9HPX4C+39G Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: 9FFW83RF+3M5 Group info: Facebook group BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: 8FR9XC2Q+4G Event link(s): LessWrong GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: 8FR86548+J4 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 8GHF22XG+23P Event link(s): LessWrong, Partiful Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: 9C4WF3JX+7Q Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C2XRVM6+3X Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: 9C3VFC45+RJM Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: 9F426439+J9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 *** 3550, where the *** are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: 9C3RFRHH+W2 Event link(s): LessWrong EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: 9C7RWRW9+M8 Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: 9C6V2657+WJR Event link(s): LessWrong LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: 9C5X6C9R+XJ Event link(s): LessWrong LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: 9C3XGWGH+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite Group info: You can join our mailing list or our Meetup.com group MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: 9C5VFQG7+MH Event link(s): LessWrong NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, Telegram Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: 9C7W294H+5V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign ?? Coordinates: 9C3WPQX6+QP9 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: 9C2P5V8V+P9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way.
Inline links: 8FWR693H+GP2, LessWrong, Facebook group, 9F26RCWC+84, LessWrong, 8GJ5M8GW+J9, LessWrong, 8FQQRX38+V6W, LessWrong, 8G6MM3M3+Q6, LessWrong, 9F2P3CRW+FP7, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9F7JMH38+GFP, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 9GF6CPRH+MQ, LessWrong, 9GG65WMJ+2J, LessWrong, LessWrong group, 8FW4CP32+J8, LessWrong, Discord, matrix server, 8FW4V86J+GH, LessWrong, 8FM3HCQW+9H, LessWrong, https://twitter.com/lakesare, 8HH6MRQ2+WH, LessWrong, 9F28Q3HJ+9Q, LessWrong, here, 9F4MG9H4+4X, LessWrong, Google Calendar, 9F28WRMX+96H, LessWrong, 8FV9XVV2+V56, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Website, an Open Street Map link, 9F5FHX4H+RXC, LessWrong, LessWrong, 8FXC2C72+85X, LessWrong, our LessWrong page, 9F3F8F6X+R6, LessWrong, Telegram group, 9F3J8CM2+PF, LessWrong, 8FWFG3H5+XR, 8FWFG3H5+XR, LessWrong, 8G95WMQR+WRP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 8FVXG2CW+2H, LessWrong, 9C3HVGQ7+JQ, LessWrong, LessWrong profile, 9C5M8PRP+JV, LessWrong, LessWrong, LW profile, Telegram, 8FJJXP22+HC, LessWrong, 8FQFF6C4+9C, LessWrong, 8FQH9VXG+9J, LessWrong, 8FMGPC92+R44, LessWrong, Facebook, 8FHJVHP9+8F, LessWrong, 9G86X426+Q5Q, LessWrong, 9F469V89+W4, LessWrong, Rationality NL Discord server, 9F4629FG+66, LessWrong, 9F48F378+PR, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9F37FMC5+VR, LessWrong, 9F4638J3+GP, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9FFGWPH7+QP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 9F6W9JJ4+JW, LessWrong, 9F2X2WVX+V2, LessWrong, Facebook event, our Facebook group, 9G346HX8+FX, LessWrong, 9F4RCW5P+X3F, LessWrong, 9G4362G8+2V, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Facebook group, Meetup.com, 8CCGPRJW+V8, LessWrong, 8GP8C2HM+9X, LessWrong, 8GR5QH8F+MW, LessWrong, 8GP2RCP7+G7, LessWrong, 8FWV44X9+XW8, LessWrong, 8FRP3F3X+6V, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 8FH495QP+96, LessWrong, 8CGRC897+F8C, LessWrong, 8C9P92F6+3RG, LessWrong, 9F9HPX4C+39G, LessWrong, Facebook event, Telegram, 9FFW83RF+3M5, Facebook group, 8FR9XC2Q+4G, LessWrong, 8FR86548+J4, LessWrong, LessWrong, 8GHF22XG+23P, LessWrong, Partiful, 9C4WF3JX+7Q, LessWrong, 9C2XRVM6+3X, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 9C3VFC45+RJM, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 9F426439+J9, LessWrong, Facebook event, 9C3RFRHH+W2, LessWrong, 9C7RWRW9+M8, 9C6V2657+WJR, LessWrong, 9C5X6C9R+XJ, LessWrong, 9C3XGWGH+3F7, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, Eventbrite, our mailing list, Meetup.com group, 9C5VFQG7+MH, LessWrong, Telegram, Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop, 9C7W294H+5V, LessWrong, 9C3WPQX6+QP9, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 9C2P5V8V+P9, LessWrong
HUNTSVILLE, AL Contact: Mike, mjhouse[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Barnes & Noble – 300 The Bridge St #100, Huntsville, AL 35806. I'll be in the cafe with a sign that says ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 866MP88H+53 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Barnes & Noble has an area for little kids. If you want to bring a service animal, that's probably fine, but I doubt they allow pets. PHOENIX, AZ Contact: Ben Morin, benjamin[dot]j[dot]morin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 1:00 PM Location: Thirsty Lion Pub in Tempe. I will have a table with an ACX sign. Coordinates: 8559FVVQ+6C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: This will be our 5th meetup (started during the meetups everywhere last year). Notes: Please email if interested to be added to the email list, even if you can't make this event BELMONT, CA Contact: Moshe Z., belmont-acx[at]devskillup[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Twin Pines Park, Picnic Tables. The table will have some sign saying 'ACX Meetup' on it. Coordinates: 849VGP8C+RRG Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: You can join the mailing list here. BERKELEY, CA Contact: Scott Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist event space at 2740 Telegraph Ave. Come in through the front gate on Telegraph. Coordinates: 849VVP5R+X7V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The Bay rationality community has a mailing list, a Discord server, and a Facebook group. There are dinner meetups every Thursday at 7 PM in the East Bay, and occasional meetups in SF and South Bay. FILLMORE, CA Contact: Ryan, wiserd[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Wiserd#0906 Time: Saturday, October 1st, 6:00 PM Location: It's my house. There are a bunch of plants on the porch and garbage bins in the driveway. Coordinates: 856393VX+VQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP to my email or Discord. Kids and dogs are welcome in the back yard. Full vaccinations (on the honor system) and masks required. GRASS VALLEY, CA Contact: Max Harms, raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Condon Park by the prospector statue. In the case of rain we'll change the location to a residence, so RSVP to get updated! Coordinates: 84FW6W8H+C5 Event link(s): LessWrong IRVINE, CA Contact: Nick C, cohenskijanuary1[at]mail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: University Town Center Coordinates: 8554M526+7H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once a month at the same location. LOS ANGELES, CA Contact: Vishal Prasad (koreindian), vprasadcs[at]gmail[dot]com, Contact me on Discord. I am "Vishal" on the server. Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:30 PM Location: 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, CA 90039 Coordinates: 8553XHWM+GP Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly every Wednesday. We have been around for over 8 years. We discuss articles, watch movies, lift weights. We have a Discord server, a LessWrong group, and a website! Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. NEWPORT BEACH, CA Contact: Michael M, michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 2:00 PM Location: Picnic tables next to 1900 Port Carlow community clubhouse. The park is verdant and pleasant and easy to access. Free street parking nearby. In case of bad weather, we have a couple of near by places to relocate to. Coordinates: 8554J48R+WCX Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We will meet most Saturdays at 2pm until whenever. There will be short suggested readings and question most weeks to spur conversation, but they are optional. Each week we will ask if people have had something happen recently that surprised them or changed the way they looked at the world. Something that should or did update their priors. Participation is optional. Notes: Its a public park with tables and BBQ's so you can bring food and well behaved pets. We may regularly go on casual walks in the surrounding area. SAN DIEGO, CA Contact: Julius, julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 3:00 PM Location: We will meet up in Bird Park. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: 8544PVQ8+Q7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Join our Discord server SAN FRANCISCO, CA Contact: Derek Pankaew, derekpankaew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: We'll between in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with a 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: 849VQHC3+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong SAN JOSE, CA Contact: David Friedman, ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: 849W825J+6P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Before Covid we hosted every month or two. No structure, just conversation and food. We feed everyone who is still there at dinner time. We have done it once or twice since Covid. I have an email list of interested people. Notes: Kids are welcome. Please RSVP to my email so I will have a rough count of how many we are feeding. SAN MARCOS, CA Contact: Eric F., EricF14159[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Hollandia Park Soccer Field. At the tables near the top parking lot. Coordinates: 85544VW4+RV Event link(s): LessWrong BOULDER, CO Contact: Josh Sacks, josh[dot]sacks+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301 Coordinates: 85GP2V96+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we know ~ how many people to expect! CARBONDALE, CO Contact: Nick, naj[at]njarboe[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: Sopris Park - Center covered picnic tables - blue shirt with ACX sign on table Coordinates: 85FJ9QXP+QMF Event link(s): LessWrong DENVER, CO Contact: Ian Philips, iansphilips[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: palebone#2796 Time: Sunday, October 2, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be in the backyard patio of St. Mark's Coffee House. I'll wear a white shirt with (my brothers') baby faces on it and have a brown hat on. Coordinates: 85FQP2VP+9R Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet typically 4 times a year. LAKEWOOD, CO Contact: Steven Zuber, stevenjzuber[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 5, 7:00 PM Location: We meet in the clubhouse located in this townhome community: 8769 W Cornell Ave Lakewood, CO 80227 Coordinates: 85FPMW64+MW Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet the first Wednesday of every month. Informal, casual atmosphere with occasional presentations by people. Notes: Check the Meetup page or Facebook group for updates. FAIRFIELD, CT Contact: Justin Barclay, barclay[dot]justin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 10:00 AM Location: South Pine Creek Beach. I'll set up near the lifeguard stand. Coordinates: 87H84PCH+CM Event link(s): LessWrong MANCHESTER, CT Contact: Mike, park-mike[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Near flagpole on top of hill Coordinates: 87H9QFFH+J7 Event link(s): LessWrong NEW HAVEN, CT Contact: RM, acx[dot]meetup[dot]nhv[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 12:30 PM Location: Cross Campus (Yale University), New Haven, CT 06511. We'll be on the grass on the northern half of Cross Campus, closest to Sterling Memorial Library. I'll be wearing an orange shirt. Coordinates: 87H9836C+8VG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Feel free to bring friends! The vibe will be welcoming and relaxed, and you can stay for any amount of time. Please email me if you're thinking about coming so I can get the right number of Insomnia cookies! WASHINGTON, DC Contact: John Bennett, WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub: 2021 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20006 Coordinates: 87C4WX33+3J Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: The Washington DC ACX/SSC group has been active since the first Meetups Everywhere in 2017. We have Monthly Socials downtown, hikes, board game days, and other cultural events. We're looking to spin up more rationality Dojo-type events with nearby groups in the coming months. Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. Metered street parking on nearby blocks is free after 6:30. Closest Metros are Farragut West and Farragut North. CAPE CORAL / FORT MYERS, FL Contact: Shawn Spilman, shawn[dot]spilman[at]outlook[dot]com, 508 655 8123 Time: Sunday, October 2, 1:00 PM Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914 Coordinates: 76RWH224+44 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: RSVP via email. I can be flexible about the date. GULF BREEZE / PENSACOLA, FL Contact: Christian, christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 12, 7:30 PM Location: The Bridge Bar - 33 Gulf Breeze Pkwy A, Gulf Breeze, FL 32561 Coordinates: 862J9RCF+G6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by emailing me. Thanks! If I don't hear from anyone, I won't be there. I work for Metaculus, but promise not to talk your ear off about forecasting. (Unless you want it talked off.) MIAMI, FL Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: eric135#4943 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Buckminster Fuller Fly's Eye Dome 140 NE 39th St #001, Miami, FL 33137 ----- Look for a paper sign on a table that says ACX MEETUP west of the dome. Coordinates: 76QXRR65+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Miami ACX started in 2017. Our official meetup happens monthly in either Miami or Broward. There are activities happening on a weekly basis from Miami to Palm Beach. We have a Facebook group, Discord server, and Meetup.com group. ORLANDO, FL Contact: Noah Topper, noah[dot]topper[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 7:00 PM Location: 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL. We'll be meeting up at UCF's pavilion near Garages A and I. I'll have a pretty ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 76WWJQ2X+82 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We try to meet up once a month, so far they've just been casual social meetups with natural discussions of rationality topics. Here's our Discord link :) Notes: RSVPs on LessWrong would be greatly appreciated. :) TALLAHASSEE, FL Contact: JF, jf19o[at]fsu[dot]edu Time: Monday, August 29, 2:00 PM Location: Landis, FSU. I will be wearing a black shirt Coordinates: 862QCPR3+PX Event link(s): LessWrong ATHENS, GA Contact: Dallon, knox[dot]dallon[dot]a[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: leonard#4208 Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Hendershots on Prince Avenue Coordinates: 865RXJ68+2W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I might bring some board games ATLANTA, GA Contact: Steve French, steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1 · Atlanta, GA (upstairs – look for the ACX Atlanta sign) Coordinates: 865QRH2F+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We've been in existence for four years – we have a dedicated crew and a very active Slack group Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com HONOLULU, HI Contact: Matt Popovich, mattpopovich[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: We'll meet at Magic Island at Ala Moana Beach Park, 1201 Ala Moana Blvd, Honolulu, HI 96814. From the parking lot, walk along the left side of the peninsula out toward Magic Island Lagoon. We're usually near the end of the peninsula, somewhere around the bathroom building. Look for the large 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: 73H475M3+JP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Honolulu Rationality hosts discussion meetups about twice a month in Ala Moana Beach Park. Check us out on our website BOISE, ID Contact: Julia and John, jae[dot]miomu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 7, 6:00 PM Location: Old Timer's Shelter in Ann Morrison Park. I will have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 85M5JQ6P+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP and feel free to bring kids. CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, IL Contact: Ben, cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 7:00 PM Location: Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 4403 Coordinates: 86GH4Q7G+H8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Discord server Notes: RSVPs are appreciated but not at all required. You can RSVP by email or by pinging me in the Discord server. Suggested entrance is the East side of the building (see Coordinates) - we'll try to make sure at least that door is unlocked, but if it isn't then ping us on email or Discord. CHICAGO, IL Contact: Todd, info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com, https://chicagorationality.com/ Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Grant Park - North side of Balbo between the tracks and Columbus Coordinates: 86HJV9FH+84 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Chicago Rationality does a monthly discussion meetup (typically the first Saturday of the month) and a monthly social meetup (typically the third weekend of the month) Notes: Sign up for our email list to be notified of future meetups EVANSTON, IL Contact: Uzair, uzairq93[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 7:00 PM Location: 626 Church Street, Evanston IL 60201 Coordinates: 86JJ28X9+5WQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The venue is a pub but it's really more of a restaurant, big long tables available so space should be fine and non drinkers shouldn't feel too out of place. BLOOMINGTON, IN Contact: Avery, acxbloomington[at]fastmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 2:00 PM Location: Switchyard Park. Will be at one of the tables near the Rogers Street parking lot. I will bring a cardboard sign that says “ACX”. Coordinates: 86FM4FX6+4Q Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We met last year for Meetups Everywhere and it was fun! Here's a link to our Discord. Notes: You can RSVP via Discord or email, but you are encouraged to show up even if you did not RSVP! WEST LAFAYETTE, IN Contact: NR, mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: 1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906. We'll be in the south of the Earhart Hall lobby (not the dining court) near the piano, and I will be wearing a green shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 86GMC3GG+728 Event link(s): LessWrong LEXINGTON, KY Contact: Nathan, nwculley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 7:00 PM Location: Blue Stallion Brewing. 610 W. 3rd St., Lexington, KY 40508. We will have a sign indicating we are the ACX meetup. Coordinates: 86CQ3F4X+VF Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet 1-2 times a month to talk about ACX, books, memes, etc., often over drinks and board games. NEW ORLEANS, LA Contact: Blake, blake[at]philosophers[dot]group Time: Sunday, September 4, 11:11 AM Location: Petite Clouet Cafe. Look for the group with an iPad that has a People’s Pint sticker. Coordinates: 76XFXX73+8R Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Website Notes: Hybrid in-person and online, video link sent weekly. Email for the link. BOSTON, MA Contact: Robi Rahman, robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com, 7039818526 Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Boston Common, at the Parkman Bandstand gazebo Coordinates: 87JC9W3M+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Mailing list, Facebook group, Meetup.com Notes: We'll be providing food at the meetup, and giving out free books related to ACX, rationality, and effective altruism. Email the hosts if you'd like a particular book or you have any dietary restrictions. Our group is also doing a tour of the JFK Presidential Library on September 9, you’re welcome to join! NORTHAMPTON, MA Contact: Alex, alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 6:00 PM Location: The Deck, 125A Pleasant St., Northampton MA 01096. The official address is bizarre and inaccurate; it's the outdoor dining part of a group of bars & restaurants in a former rail station... a whole block away from Pleasant St. The simplest way to get to The Deck is to enter The Platform, one of the other restaurants, by its street entrance around 36 Strong Ave., here (make sure to look at street view). Go inside and ask them to show you to The Deck. We'll have a sign. Coordinates: 87J9899F+H7H Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We started in the 2018 Meetups Everywhere and is still going strong. We aim to meet about once every two weeks. At most meetups we get about 5-7 people out of a rotation of 15-20; Meetups Everywhere and other special events tend to bring in a few more than usual. We're a totally social meetup with no 'format' or suggested readings. Although it's not rare for us to touch on ACX articles and related topics, the conversation varies wildly, and you are welcome even if you're the most occasional ACX reader. Notes: We have a (not very active) Discord where you can DM me or post on a public channel. I'm most responsive by email. There is a small chance we'll have to change the location to somewhere else in Northampton. Please check the Less Wrong or Facebook posts on or after August 26 to get the final word on location. BALTIMORE, MD Contact: Rivka, rivka[at]adrusi[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 7:00 PM Location: UMBC outside of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, on the north side. I will have a sign that says ACX meetup. Parking is free on the weekends. Edit: Rain is forecasted; if it’s raining, we will be inside of the Performing Arts building, on the ground floor just inside the entrance. Coordinates: 87F5774P+53 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet Sundays at 7pm — half are in person and half are virtual. Notes: There will be pizza and drinks DETROIT, MI Contact: Matt Arnold, matt[dot]mattarn[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 7:00 PM Location: Tenacity Craft, 8517 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI 48202 Coordinates: 86JR9WG9+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong MINNEAPOLIS, MN Contact: Timothy, tmbond[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at the picnic tables near the southeast corner of Powderhorn Park - the ones by the parking lot. I will be wearing a green Google t-shirt and have a sign that says ACX. Coordinates: 86P8WPRW+76 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will bring some snacks (but not a full lunch, so eat before or bring something if you'll be that hungry). Please RSVP on LessWrong. KANSAS CITY, MO Contact: Alex, alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: We will be in the courtyard above Whole Foods (which is also an apartment complex). You can enter through the apartment lobby, located on Oak Street. We will have runners shepherding people from the entrance up to the courtyard. Coordinates: 86F72CM8+RR Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com SAINT LOUIS, MO Contact: JohnBuridan, littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: Lily Pond Shelter, Tower Grove Park, St. Louis Coordinates: 86CFJP4R+XV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: BYOB WEST PLAINS, MO Contact: Liam, liamhession[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 12:00 PM Location: 10/40 Coffee, 24 Court Square, West Plains, MO Coordinates: 868CP4HW+CV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Hoping to get anyone from around the Ozark region DURHAM, NC Contact: Will Jarvis, willdjarvis[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 8, 7:30 PM Location: Ponysaurus Brewing Company, 219 Hood St, Durham Coordinates: 8773X4Q3+QW Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly! We also have a Discord LAKEWOOD, NJ Contact: Ben L, mywebdev3[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 29, 8:30 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong MORRISTOWN, NJ Contact: Matt, matt[dot]brooks[at]impactmarkets[dot]io, Discord: Matt B#0216 Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: 10 N Park Pl, Morristown, NJ 07960 (at the center of the Morristown Green) Coordinates: 87G7QGW9+RJ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: This is the first meetup, come be a founding member of the Northern NJ ACX/EA/LW group! PRINCETON, NJ Contact: Danny K, dskumpf[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:00 PM Location: Palmer Square, Princeton, NJ 08540. On the green right outside The Bent Spoon and Rojo's Roastary, near the big tree. I'll have some sort of ACX Meetup sign! Coordinates: 87G7982Q+2CP Event link(s): LessWrong LAS VEGAS, NV Contact: Jonathan Ray, ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 11:45 AM Location: At El Segundo Sol restaurant with giant ACX MEETUP signs Coordinates: 85864RHJ+3H Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet regularly and mostly just socialize. We have a new Discord server. RENO, NV Contact: Steven, stevenl451[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Steeven#7407 Time: Friday, September 2, 5:30 PM Location: We'll be in Crissie Caughlin Park, near the tables and the swing set Coordinates: 85F2G46W+FG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs and please RSVP on LessWrong if you are going BUFFALO, NY Contact: George Herold, ggherold[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 1:00 PM Location: 932 Welch Rd. Java Center, NY 14082 Coordinates: 87J3W467+8P Notes: Last-minute location change! LONG ISLAND, NY Contact: Gabe, gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, October 27, 7:00 PM Location: Whales Tale in Northport Coordinates: 87G8VJRW+99 Event link(s): LessWrong NEW YORK CITY, NY Contact: Jasmine, jasminermj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Pavillion @ Rockefeller Park, Warren St / River Terrace Coordinates: 87G7PX9M+4J3 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: OBNYC has a Discord and a Google Group; the Google Group is the main mailing list we use for events NEWBURGH, NY Contact: Pedro David Bonilla, proportionatetoevidence[at]gmail[dot]com, Cell 8452001681 Time: Saturday, September 24, 10:00 AM Location: Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 1421 NY-300, Newburgh, NY 12550 Coordinates: 87H7GWCH+GF Event link(s): LessWrong ROCHESTER, NY Contact: Skivverus, skivverus[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Skivverus#5915 Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: 4870 Culver Road; will be wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and glasses, and may or may not have figured out a sign due to just getting back from honeymoon. Look for a pair of parrots, one white, one green with a yellow/orange head. Coordinates: 87M46FM6+Q5P Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Venue very near amusement park; non-bathroom, non-parking amenities are therefore available but not free. Plan accordingly. Not particularly attached to specific location named, just happen to live reasonably close to there; alternative suggestions acceptable. Canadian visitors also welcome should your logistics permit; airport transportation available. RSVP via Discord preferred, but email will also work. CLEVELAND, OH Contact: Jack Zhang, LukeZhao9[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:00 PM Location: Picnic tables at Wade Oval (university circle) Coordinates: 86HWG96Q+GC5 Event link(s): LessWrong COLUMBUS, OH Contact: Daniel, daniel[dot]m[dot]adamiak[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: Jeffrey Park - Clinton Shelter. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: 86FVX3C3+QF Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once a month. We discuss EA, AI and other two letter initialisms. Occasionally we go for walks in local grottos and nature trails. Notes: Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list to receive any updates or future invites. RSVPing is appreciated. TOLEDO, OH Contact: Scout, scout[dot]sivar[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 12:00 PM Location: Black Kite Coffee Coordinates: 86HRMCCV+9R Event link(s): LessWrong OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Contact: bean, battleshipbean[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 1:00 PM Location: Edmond Public Library/Shannon Miller Park. I will be wearing a hat that says USS Iowa on it. Coordinates: 8674MG3C+MW Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Had four people last year and a good time, moved to Edmond because a lot of us are up here. ALBANY, OR Contact: Kenan (he/him), kbitikofer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: Bowman Park, Albany, Oregon. In or near the shelter. I will wear a bright red shirt and carry a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 84PRJWR7+XC6 Event link(s): LessWrong CORVALLIS, OR Contact: Ethan Ashkie, ethanashkie[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 7, 6:00 PM Location: Common Fields, in the reserved outdoor seating near the entrance Coordinates: 84PRHP5P+VQ Event link(s): LessWrong EUGENE, OR Contact: Ben Smith, benjsmith[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 7:00 PM Location: The Barn Light, 924 Willamette St, Eugene 97401 Coordinates: 84PR2WX4+VV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much pizza to get, but if you forget, don't worry about it, we want you to come along anyway PORTLAND, OR Contact: Sam F Celarek, support[at]pearcommunity[dot]com, 513-432-3310, Discord: Sam Celarek#2845 Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: 205 NW 4th Ave Coordinates: 84QVG8FG+V4 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Portland Effective Altruism and Rationality is very active. We have book clubs, bi-weekly AI safety meet-ups, bi-weekly topical meet-ups, bi-weekly socials, and have an active Discord. Notes: We would prefer you RSVP on Meetup.com a week beforehand so that we can get the right amount of food! HARRISBURG, PA Contact: Phil, acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Ever Grain Brewing Co, 4444 Carlisle Pike, Camp Hill, PA 17011 - We will be sitting at one of the picnic tables outside with an ACX MEETUP sign Coordinates: 87G562QQ+8P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Small monthly meetup group based out of Harrisburg - celebrating 1 year of actuality! You can see more of our events on LessWrong. INDIANA, PA Contact: Eric, ericindianapa[at]gmail[dot]com, 717-256-2717 Time: Saturday, September 24, 11:00 AM Location: Caffè Amadeus in downtown Indiana, PA. I will have a sign with 'ACX Meetup' on one of the tables. Coordinates: 87G2JRFX+48 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP via email or text message so I know how many to expect. PHILADELPHIA, PA Contact: Wes and Diana, rationalphilly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: The Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. The meeting room is in the basement, look for the signs. Coordinates: 87F6WRXG+FQ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We tend to meet in downtown Philly on the last Thursday of the month. We're aiming to make the Ethical Society our new steady location. We have many links: Discord, Google Calendar, Facebook, Meetup, Google Group Notes: We'll be ordering food from a local restaurant, so no need to eat first. BYOB PITTSBURGH, PA Contact: Justin, pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Westinghouse Shelter @ Schenley Park (W Circuit Rd near Schenley Dr). We have the outdoor shelter reserved, so light rain shouldn't be a problem, but in the event of extreme weather, we may relocate indoors (our default 'contingency indoor location' is Crazy Mocha Coffee on 2100 Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill). Coordinates: 87G2C3Q4+773 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet monthly-ish for general discussion and chit-chat, email me if you'd like to be notified of future meetups. STATE COLLEGE, PA Contact: John Slow, auk480[at]psu[dot]edu Time: Thursday, September 8, 5:00 PM Location: Old Main. I will be carrying an ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 87G4Q4WP+HV Event link(s): LessWrong SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO Contact: Dan Gelfarb, danielgelfarb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Lote 23, back corner under the tents. I will be wearing a blue shirt with a sign that says ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: 77CMCWVM+W32 Event link(s): LessWrong PROVIDENCE, RI Contact: James Bailey, feanor1600[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Prospect Terrace park, to the right of the Roger Williams statue Coordinates: 87HCRHJV+24 Event link(s): LessWrong SIOUX FALLS, SD Contact: S. C., villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:00 PM Location: 410 E 26th St, Sioux Falls, SD 57105 - the pavillion on the west side of McKennan Park, or the tables just south of it if I can't book it. I'll be the guy with the grill. Coordinates: 86M5G7JH+W57 Event link(s): LessWrong MEMPHIS, TN Contact: Michael, michael[at]postlibertarian[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 1:00 PM Location: French Truck Coffee at Crosstown Concourse, Central Atrium 1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104. We will be at one of the many tables near French Truck Coffee and I will have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: 867F5X2P+QHC Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet about every month or so. We've been around since 2019 but only regularly since mid 2021 due to the pandemic. We have a Discord server. NASHVILLE, TN Contact: Ellen, enwiegand[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 11:00 AM Location: OneCity Nashville (8 City Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209), next to the volleyball courts. I'll have a pink ballcap that says SPINSTER on it. Coordinates: 868M552H+XW Event link(s): LessWrong AUSTIN, TX Contact: Silas Barta, sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 12:00 PM Location: 4001 N Lamar, Austin Texas, park by Central Market near stone tables and tents Coordinates: 86248746+8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Austin LessWrong has a weekly focused discussion, a weekly social mixer, a weekly online book club, and a monthly movie night. Been around since 2011. Notes: Location may change as we are talking to other venues BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION, TX Contact: Kenny, easwaran[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: Back patio of Torchy's Tacos at Texas and New Main. I'll have a yellow umbrella and pinkish/purple hair Coordinates: JMFC+4J Event link(s): LessWrong DALLAS, TX Contact: Ethan Morse, ethan[dot]morse97[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ethanmorse#5255 Time: Sunday, September 11, 12:00 PM Location: Union, 3705 Cedar Springs Rd, Dallas, TX 75219. We'll be in the upstairs conference room. Coordinates: 8645R55R+9M9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get HOUSTON, TX Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Empire Cafe, 1732 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77098 ---- Look for a table with an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: 76X6PHVW+5H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: There are meetups every week. We have a Discord and a Facebook group. WACO, TX Contact: Mike, BaylorACX[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 1:00 PM Location: Cameron Park, picnic tables next to Jacob's Ladder Coordinates: 8634HVG2+V9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me if you're thinking about attending! Would love to start an ACX community here :) SALT LAKE CITY, UT Contact: Ross Richey (aka Jeremiah), wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park near the ChargePoint stations Coordinates: 85GCP4WF+VJ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet every other month, we do book clubs and movie nights as well. Notes: Will be outdoors. If the weather looks bad, email event organizer to check on location. CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA Contact: RL, effectivealtruismatuva[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 5:00 PM Location: 12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 - We’ll meet at the picnic tables across the street from The Virginian. There will be an ACX sign. Coordinates: 87C32FPX+3H4 Event link(s): LessWrong LYNCHBURG, VA Contact: Craig, craigbdaniel[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Three Roads Brewing - I will be wearing a purple t-shirt and will place an ""ACX"" card on the table Coordinates: 8792CV65+5G NORFOLK, VA Contact: Willa, walambert[at]pm[dot]me Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Pagoda & Oriental Garden, 265 W Tazewell St, Norfolk, VA 23510. I will be wearing a bright green shirt, will have a large green & yellow hat on, and will have a sign with ACX Meetup on it. Coordinates: 8785RPX4+W3 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Hi! Virginia Rationalists was co-founded in Norfolk VA earlier this year by Willa & Yitzi with the goal of growing a thriving ACX / LW / EA community in our city & the state of Virginia. We meet every week at Fair Grounds cafe on Wednesday evenings from 5-7:30pm Eastern Time. We have a Discord server and a Twitter. RESTON, VA Contact: James, jrbalch333[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:30 PM Location: The matchbox at 1900 Reston Station Blvd, Reston, VA 20190 on the 1st floor of the giant Google building. I'll be holding a copy of Sapiens. Coordinates: 87C4WMX6+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me to be added to the WhatsApp group RICHMOND, VA Contact: Cedar, cedar[dot]ren+acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com, @Cedar at this Discord server Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:30 PM Location: Richmond Public Libraries, West End Branch 5420 Patterson Ave, Richmond, VA 23226 Coordinates: 8794HFHQ+3G Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong & optionally reach out to me on Discord to introduce yourself! BURLINGTON, VT Contact: Forrest, lucidobservor[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Battery Park, at the benches in the south-western corner of the park, near the cannons facing the lake. I will have an 'ACX Meetup' sign. Coordinates: 87P8FQJH+8P Event link(s): LessWrong BELLINGHAM, WA Contact: Alex, bellinghamrationalish[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 5:30 PM Location: Lake Padden Park, at one of the tables near the lake by the dog park. If it's rainy, we'll meet in one of the two covered gazebo areas just north (right, if you're facing the lake) of the planned spot. If the forecast looks really bad (e.g. very cold), I'll post an indoor location to the Meetup.com page at least three days in advance. Coordinates: 84WVMHX3+GM Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Bellingham Rationalish discusses (in good faith!) topics in and around rationality. We usually meet the evening of the last Wednesday of each month. Our first meeting was a 2021 ACX Everywhere meetup. Notes: Please RSVP on Meetup so I have an idea how many people to expect. Kids, animals, food, beverages, etc. are all welcome. SEATTLE, WA Contact: Nikita Sokolsky, sokolx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 5:00 PM Location: Optimism Brewing (1158 Broadway, Seattle) Coordinates: 84VVJM7H+4Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong (or FB/Meetup) for planning purposes MADISON, WI Contact: Mary Wang, mmwang[at]wisc[dot]edu Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: 1022 High St. Blue house with red porches. If weather permits, we'll be in my large backyard, which has more seating now than last year. If rain, come in the side door. There will be air purifiers and open windows. Masks optional. Look for a sign at the end of the driveway that says ACX/SSC Meetup. Coordinates: 86MG3H3X+XW Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We have met fortnightly in the past, but quit last year when it got too cold to meet outside. We typically have shared a meal, sat around my kitchen table and talked. Have held a Solstice celebration.
Inline links: 866MP88H+53, LessWrong, 8559FVVQ+6C, LessWrong, 849VGP8C+RRG, LessWrong, here, 849VVP5R+X7V, LessWrong, mailing list, Discord server, Facebook group, 856393VX+VQ, LessWrong, 84FW6W8H+C5, LessWrong, 8554M526+7H, LessWrong, the server, 8553XHWM+GP, LessWrong, LessWrong group, website, 8554J48R+WCX, LessWrong, Facebook event, 8544PVQ8+Q7, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Discord server, 849VQHC3+V8, LessWrong, 849W825J+6P, LessWrong, 85544VW4+RV, LessWrong, 85GP2V96+JQ, LessWrong, 85FJ9QXP+QMF, LessWrong, 85FQP2VP+9R, LessWrong, 85FPMW64+MW, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Facebook group, 87H84PCH+CM, LessWrong, 87H9QFFH+J7, LessWrong, 87H9836C+8VG, LessWrong, 87C4WX33+3J, LessWrong, Facebook event, 76RWH224+44, LessWrong, 862J9RCF+G6, LessWrong, 76QXRR65+V2, LessWrong, Facebook group, Discord server, Meetup.com group, 76WWJQ2X+82, LessWrong, Discord link, 862QCPR3+PX, LessWrong, 865RXJ68+2W, LessWrong, 865QRH2F+V8, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 73H475M3+JP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, our website, 85M5JQ6P+96, LessWrong, 86GH4Q7G+H8F, LessWrong, Discord server, 86HJV9FH+84, LessWrong, Chicago Rationality, 86JJ28X9+5WQ, LessWrong, 86FM4FX6+4Q, LessWrong, our Discord, 86GMC3GG+728, LessWrong, 86CQ3F4X+VF, LessWrong, 76XFXX73+8R, LessWrong, Website, 87JC9W3M+PR, LessWrong, Facebook event, Mailing list, Facebook group, Meetup.com, here, 87J9899F+H7H, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord, 87F5774P+53, LessWrong, 86JR9WG9+R6, LessWrong, 86P8WPRW+76, LessWrong, 86F72CM8+RR, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 86CFJP4R+XV, LessWrong, 868CP4HW+CV, LessWrong, 8773X4Q3+QW, LessWrong, a Discord, LessWrong, 87G7QGW9+RJ, LessWrong, 87G7982Q+2CP, LessWrong, 85864RHJ+3H, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord server, 85F2G46W+FG, LessWrong, 87J3W467+8P, 87G8VJRW+99, LessWrong, 87G7PX9M+4J3, LessWrong, Discord, Google Group, Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 87H7GWCH+GF, LessWrong, 87M46FM6+Q5P, LessWrong, 86HWG96Q+GC5, LessWrong, Clinton Shelter, 86FVX3C3+QF, LessWrong, 86HRMCCV+9R, LessWrong, 8674MG3C+MW, LessWrong, 84PRJWR7+XC6, LessWrong, 84PRHP5P+VQ, LessWrong, 84PR2WX4+VV, LessWrong, 84QVG8FG+V4, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Meetup.com, 87G562QQ+8P, LessWrong, on LessWrong, 87G2JRFX+48, LessWrong, 87F6WRXG+FQ, LessWrong, Discord, Google Calendar, Facebook, Meetup, Google Group, 87G2C3Q4+773, LessWrong, 87G4Q4WP+HV, LessWrong, 77CMCWVM+W32, LessWrong, 87HCRHJV+24, LessWrong, 86M5G7JH+W57, LessWrong, 867F5X2P+QHC, LessWrong, Discord server, 868M552H+XW, LessWrong, 86248746+8C, LessWrong, Austin LessWrong, JMFC+4J, LessWrong, 8645R55R+9M9, LessWrong, 76X6PHVW+5H, LessWrong, Discord, Facebook group, 8634HVG2+V9, LessWrong, 85GCP4WF+VJ, LessWrong, 87C32FPX+3H4, LessWrong, 8792CV65+5G, 8785RPX4+W3, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord server, Twitter, 87C4WMX6+9X, LessWrong, this Discord server, 8794HFHQ+3G, LessWrong, 87P8FQJH+8P, LessWrong, 84WVMHX3+GM, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 84VVJM7H+4Q, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 86MG3H3X+XW, LessWrong, Facebook event
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.
Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything, The Revelations, The Intrinsic Perspective
2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain.
Inline links: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
=3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles.
Inline links: The Castrato, Secretorum, Seeds of Science
Open Thread 243
September 26, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Many of you enjoyed Lars Doucet’s book review on Georgism and subsequent followup posts; he also won an ACX Grant to further investigate. Now he’s turning his Georgist work into a book, Land Is A Big Deal, due out October 15:
Inline links: book review on Georgism, subsequent, followup, posts, ACX Grant, Land Is A Big Deal
4: ACX meetups update: this week we have Tallinn on Monday, Tanzania on Thursday, Princeton + Irvine on Saturday, and Berlin + Dublin + Barcelona + Denver on Sunday - plus many more. And if you went to a meetup, Mingyuan would like to hear how it went - especially from organizers, but attendees can respond too. You can send her this form.
Inline links: many more, this form
Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas
October 31, 2022 · Original source
[Original post here]
Inline links: here
Okay, “half” is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn’t real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
And Tim:
Inline links: Tim
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants (see original grants here) and sent me a one-year update.
Inline links: see original grants here
Depending on how various impact-market-related people do, I’ll probably have a second round of ACX Grants sometime between now and mid-2023.
Open Thread 250
November 13, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In other news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: I have no idea what’s going to happen with ACX Grants now. Some of the infrastructure I was hoping to use was being funded by the FTX Foundation and may no longer exist. It might or might not be more important to use all available funding to rescue charities about to go under from losing FTX support. I still want to do something, because of the increased need and urgency mentioned above, but give me a while to hide under my bed and gibber before I sort out specifics.
4: None of last year’s ACX Grants were funded by the FTX Foundation or anyone else linked to FTX, so if this is you, don’t worry.
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
Do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros? Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world. I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use. Ukraine has always been among the top crypto countries: in 2021, NYT called it “the crypto capital of the world”. Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. NYT describes its banks as “so sclerotic that sending or receiving even small amounts of money from another country requires an exasperating obstacle course of paperwork”, and this guy says that if you deposit more than $100,000 in a Ukrainian bank, “the chance that you get it back is very slim”. When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian government doubled down on crypto as a way for friendly Westerners to donate to the war effort - $70 million as of March. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework. Venezuela’s economy has been in slow motion collapse for the past decade. Inflation is currently in the triple digits (remember, people worried the Democrats would lose the midterms because of a US inflation rate of 8%). If your country has a triple-digit inflation rate, you might prefer to use an alternative currency, which Venezuela’s authoritarian government tries to prevent people from doing. Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen. I personally contributed in a small way to Russia’s cryptocurrency use. I’ve been trying to help Russian ACX readers escape to other countries to avoid conscription or arrest. Of my two successes so far, both involved sending cryptocurrency to help them afford a ticket out and living expenses while they searched for a job in their new country. I’m pretty proud of this and I don’t think it would have been possible without crypto. I think a lot of Westerners want to think of developing-world uses as a boring sideshow, and highlight Westerners trading monkey gifs as the only part of crypto worth talking about. But about 66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America. Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I realize this is a bold sentence to use as a section header in 2022. But I recently tried to figure out the exact scam rate, and it seemed low. I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams.I tried my best not to cherry-pick, and to focus on the first article that Google fed me for each of various relevant search terms. I ended up using four articles for this experiment: Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015
Inline links: 69% of Vietnamese, a history, remittances, “the crypto capital of the world”, this guy, $70 million as of March, pass a law, More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America, Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
1. Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions 3. Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good 4. Other Interesting Comments 5. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate
Inline links: Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis, Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions, Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good, Other Interesting Comments, Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate
Woody Hochmann writes:
Inline links: writes
And MM adds:
Inline links: adds
Open Thread 254
December 12, 2022 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 257
January 01, 2023 · Original source
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1: In case you missed it earlier: please take the ACX Survey, expected time 20 - 40 minutes, results will be used to satisfy my curiosity and test weird hypotheses.
Inline links: please take the ACX Survey
2: Some updates/corrections to last week’s Links post: Sniffnoy explains how private fire departments stayed in business. Questions about / alternative explanations for declining Native American test scores. The hack to beat AI at Go probably isn’t as interesting as I thought. Cremieux does a deep dive into the persistence-of-poverty-after-slavery study I hoped someone would do a deep dive into. Ivan Fyodorovich on why surname analysis doesn’t disprove Albion’s Seed.
Inline links: Sniffnoy explains, Questions about / alternative explanations for, isn’t as interesting as I thought, does a deep dive into, Ivan Fyodorovich on
Open Thread 258
January 08, 2023 · Original source
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1: In case you missed it the past few times: please take the ACX Survey, expected time 20 - 40 minutes, results will be used to satisfy my curiosity and test weird hypotheses.
Inline links: please take the ACX Survey
2: This is your last chance to submit guesses to the 2023 Prediction Contest in Blind Mode, or to resubmit more up-to-date predictions if you submitted earlier and really want to do that (I will try to remove predictions about things that changed too much over the past few weeks, so don’t feel obligated).
Inline links: the 2023 Prediction Contest
Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 262
February 06, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: In case you missed it: Berkeley meetup this Tuesday, special guest Daniel Ingram.
Inline links: Berkeley meetup this Tuesday
3: Comment of the week: Meropenem fills in more details about the Cadegiani case mentioned in my ivermectin article.
Inline links: fills in more details about the Cadegiani case
Open Thread 263
February 13, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
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3: Comments of the week: Maximum Limelihood Estimator explains why we should expect the error on Wisdom of Crowds task to be the inverse square root. And demost beat me to analyzing the Wisdom of Crowds survey results.
Inline links: Maximum Limelihood Estimator explains, demost beat me to
Trying Again On Fideism
February 15, 2023 · Original source
Thanks to Chris Kavanagh, who wrote an extremely kind and reasonable comment in response to my Contra Kavanagh on Fideism and made me feel bad for yelling at him. I’m sorry for my tone, even though I'm never going to get a proper beef at this rate.
Inline links: an extremely kind and reasonable comment, Contra Kavanagh on Fideism
Chris was too nice to really defend himself, but a few other people posted what I think of as partial arguments for the position I mocked as "fideism". For example, Scott Aaronson:
Inline links: Scott Aaronson
Idiocy: Conspiracy theories are a thing dumb people sometimes fall for. If you understand that facts require evidence, and you’re not a Nazi trying to explain why the Jews caused 9-11, then there’s basically no chance you’ll believe. You mostly have to stay away from outright lies - for example, someone making up a story about a Jew confessing to causing 9-11 - which is easy to do, because you can just fact-check these.
Inline links: outright lies
Issue Two Of Asterisk
March 08, 2023 · Original source
Plus superforecaster Juan Cambeiro on predicting pandemics, Mike Hinge on feeding the world through nuclear/volcanic winter (his organization, ALLFED, got an ACX grant last year), Dynomight on how a big NIH alcohol study went wrong (hopefully you already read this on his excellent blog), Jordan Hampton with the obligatory wild animal suffering article, Matt Reynolds on oral rehydration therapy, and more.
Inline links: predicting pandemics, feeding the world through nuclear/volcanic winter, an ACX grant, how a big NIH alcohol study went wrong, excellent blog, the obligatory wild animal suffering article, on oral rehydration therapy
Open Thread 267
March 12, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Today is investors’ last chance to bid on impact certificates in our mini-grants round. Current situation:
Inline links: bid on impact certificates, mini-grants round
Open Thread 268
March 20, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Remember, your due date for this year’s Book Review Contest is April 5. You can read more, including how to enter, here.
Inline links: here
2: I’ve recently seen several people refer to my Why Not Slow AI Progress? as an argument against trying to slow AI progress. Some people have even tried to cite me as an “authority” saying slowing AI progress is bad. Please don’t do this! I wrote that post because every few weeks someone was writing an essay saying “We should try to slow AI progress, why aren’t you doing that?” with no specifics, everyone agreed with them, and nothing got done. I wanted to try to move the discussion past that stage; instead, I just made people switch to writing essays saying “We should try to slow AI progress, why aren’t you doing that, must be because Scott’s against it”. I’m not against it, I’m just trying to explain the state of the discussion up to now.
Inline links: Why Not Slow AI Progress?
Open Thread 269
March 27, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Highlights From The Comments On Telemedicine Regulations
April 03, 2023 · Original source
[Original post: The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again]
Inline links: The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again
Some people countered that drug addiction was very bad, and preventing it is worth some inconvenience. For example, Michael van der Ruyt:
Inline links: Michael van der Ruyt
Lela Markham:
Inline links: Lela Markham
Open Thread 271
April 09, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Some good pushback to my post Most Technologies Aren’t Races, arguing that even my examples of historical non-race technologies were races at the time. See especially Erusian, Tatu Ahponen, Jumpingjacksplash, and (thanks to anonymous emailer) Ding & Dafoe (2023) (Twitter summary here). I agree any technology with military applications is more than zero a race; I still think under most assumptions it’s only a race in the same sense that stealth aircraft are a race, rather than the existential threat you would get if you imported singularitarian scenarios and took out the singularitarian bits.
Inline links: Most Technologies Aren’t Races, Erusian, Tatu Ahponen, Jumpingjacksplash, Ding & Dafoe (2023), here
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 13th, 03:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GC Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iiNaqC3xiRAxWwj6M/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-4
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GC, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iiNaqC3xiRAxWwj6M/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-4
Open Thread 275
May 08, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
(Update: the list of reviews that especially need more ratings is here.)
Inline links: here
2: The DEA has announced it will be reconsidering the proposed new policy I complained about in The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again. Alert reader jonpalisoc1024, who noticed this and posted it to the subreddit, wrote:
Inline links: has announced, The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again
Open Thread 277
May 22, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
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2: I published the first Book Review contest finalist, Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, last week, and I’m happy with both the review and the interesting comments it sparked off. See the threads on import substitution vs. specialization, fixed exchange rates, optimum currency areas, and Quebec.
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism, import substitution, specialization, fixed exchange rates, optimum currency areas, Quebec
1: ACX Grants update: 1DaySooner is surveying people who have been involved in conducting phase III clinical trials (eg doctor, nurse, statistician, recruitment coordinator) to get their opinion on human challenge trials. If you're in this category and willing to help, go to hctexpertopinion.com
Inline links: hctexpertopinion.com
Open Thread 280
June 12, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here.
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 281
June 18, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Atlanta meetup is still on, scheduled for 3 PM today, see here for more information.
Inline links: see here
2: Comments of the week are Erica, Anthony, Worley, and Neuromancer on the textual history of Njal’s Saga and how it was influenced by later Christians.
Inline links: Erica, Anthony, Worley, Neuromancer
Open Thread 282
June 25, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
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3: Correction on the review of Programming And Metaprogramming The Human Biocomputer (subscriber only post): I wrote that the game Ecco The Dolphin was based on John Lilly’s bizarre theory of coincidences. Commenter Angela gave strong evidence that this is false - see here and also here, by the game designer - and all the resemblances are, uh, coincidental.
Inline links: the review of, Angela, here, here
Every Flashing Element On Your Site Alienates And Enrages Users
June 28, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 283
July 02, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: In the comments of the Flashing Element post, several people complained that ACX has a subscribe popup. This is unintentional, and I’ve tried to get rid of it by checking all the relevant boxes on my dashboard. If you can still see it, please comment here to report it as a bug to Substack.
Inline links: Flashing Element post, comment here
Open Thread 284
July 10, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
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Open Thread 285
July 17, 2023 · Original source
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1: Thanks to everyone who pushed back against my overly cynical post on college admissions. Some of the best responses were Yes, Students At Elite Schools Are Actually Taught Different Things, and the several people (eg Raghu Parthasarathy) pointing out that smart people want to socialize with other smart people.
Inline links: Yes, Students At Elite Schools Are Actually Taught Different Things, Raghu Parthasarathy
Meetups Everywhere Fall 2023 - Call For Organizers
August 01, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 289
August 14, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here.
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 7th, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GCQ Notes: RSVP on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Ei3MKRfdH4eXnPjnD/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-6
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GCQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Ei3MKRfdH4eXnPjnD/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-6
WASHINGTON, DC, USA Contact: John Bennett Contact Info: WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub, 2021 K St NW, Washington, DC 20006 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J Group Link: Uptown: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, Downtown https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/ and https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx. Notable Guests: Robin Hanson, notable economist Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. There is metered street parking on nearby blocks; the closest Metro stations are Farragut West and Farragut North.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J, https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/, https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx
PUNTA DEL ESTE, URUGUAY Contact: Manu Contact Info: astralcodexten[at]maraoz[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 14th, 2:00 PM Location: Borneo Coffee Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q734PQ+58
Inline links: https://plus.codes/48Q734PQ+58
Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
Original post: What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
Inline links: What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
Erusian writes:
Inline links: writes
Giles English (extremely relevant blog) writes:
Inline links: extremely relevant blog, writes
Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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.]
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
1st: The Educated Mind, reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon is the founder of Science is WEIRD, a sprawling online science course that helps kids fall in love with the world. He’s also re-imagining what education can be at his Substack, The Lost Tools of Learning (losttools.substack.com).
Inline links: The Educated Mind, Science is WEIRD, losttools.substack.com
2nd: On the Marble Cliffs, reviewed by Daniel Böttger. Daniel writes the Seven Secular Sermons, a huge rationalist poetry/meditation art project, and has a blog post pitching it to ACX readers in particular.
Inline links: On the Marble Cliffs, Seven Secular Sermons, a blog post pitching it to ACX readers in particular
3rd: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, reviewed by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters and was also the author of one of last year’s finalists, Making Nature.
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters, Making Nature
Open Thread 294
September 18, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
23
September 21, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 299
October 23, 2023 · Original source
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My Left Kidney
October 27, 2023 · Original source
This isn’t controlling for selection bias - but neither was my uncle’s anecdotal observation. So although it does make me slightly nervous, I’m not going to treat it as actionable evidence. Still, my girlfriend ending up begging me not to donate, and I caved. But we broke up in 2019. The next few years were bumpy, but by 2022 my life was in a more stable place and I started thinking about kidneys again. By then I was married. I discussed the risks with my wife and she decided to let me go ahead. So in early November 2022, for the second time, I sent a form to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center saying I wanted to donate a kidney. IV. Something else happened that month. On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”. But during the flurry of intakes, screenings, and evaluations that UCSF gave me that month, the doctors asked “so what made you want to donate?” And I hadn’t rehearsed an answer to this one, so I blurted out “Have you heard of effective altruism?” I expected the worst. But the usual response was “Oh! Those people! Great, no further explanation needed.” When everyone else abandoned us, the organ banks still thought of us as those nice people who were always giving them free kidneys. We were giving them a lot of free kidneys. When I talked to my family and non-EA friends about wanting to donate, the usual reaction was “You want to what?!” and then trying to convince me this was unfair to my wife or my potential future children or whatever. When I talked to my EA friends, the reaction was at least “Cool!”. But pretty often it was “Oh yeah, I donated two years ago, want to see my scar?” Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized. I was blessed with a community where this was so normal that I could read a Vox article about it and not vomit it back out. This is surprising, because kidney donation is only medium effective, as far as altruisms go4. The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a “chain” of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years. This is great - my grandfather died of kidney disease, and 10 - 20 more years with him would have meant a lot. But it only costs about $5,000 - $10,000 to produce this many QALYs through bog-standard effective altruist interventions, like buying mosquito nets for malarial regions in Africa. In a Philosophy 101 Thought Experiment sense, if you’re going to miss a lot of work recovering from your surgery, you might as well skip the surgery, do the work, and donate the extra money to Against Malaria Foundation instead5. Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest. Their math checked out, and I believe them when they say this was the most effective use for that money. For their work, they got a million sneering thinkpieces on how “EA just takes people’s money to buy castles, then sit in them wearing crowns and waving scepters and laughing at poor people”. I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. I worry that people use suffering as a heuristic for goodness. Mother Teresa becomes a hero because living with lepers in the Calcutta slums sounds horrible - so anyone who does it must be really charitable (regardless of whether or not the lepers get helped). Owning a castle is the opposite of suffering - it sounds great - therefore it is fake charity (no matter how much good you do with the castle). This heuristic isn’t terrible. If you’re suffering for your charity, then it must seem important to you, and you’re obviously not doing it for personal gain. If you do charity in a way that benefits you (like gets you a castle), then the personal gain aspect starts looking suspicious. The problem is the people who elevate it from a suspicion to an automatic condemnation. It seems like such a natural thing to do. And it encourages people to be masochists, sacrificing themselves pointlessly in photogenic ways, instead of thinking about what will actually help others. But getting back to the point: kidney donation has an unusually high ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gains. So why do EAs keep doing it? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll speak for myself. It starts with wanting, just once, do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It would be morally fraught to do this with money, since any money you spent on improving your self-image would be denied to the people in malarial regions of Africa who need it the most. But it’s not like there’s anything else you can do with that spare kidney. Still, it’s not just about that. All of this calculating and funging takes a psychic toll. Your brain uses the same emotional heuristics as everyone else’s. No matter how contrarian you pretend to be, deep down it’s hard to make your emotions track what you know is right and not what the rest of the world is telling you. The last Guardian opinion columnist who must be defeated is the Guardian opinion columnist inside your own heart. You want to do just one good thing that you’ll feel unreservedly good about, and where you know somebody’s going to be directly happy at the end of it in a way that doesn’t depend on a giant rickety tower of assumptions. Dylan Matthews wrote: As I’m no doubt the first person to notice, being an adult is hard. You are consistently faced with choices — about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family — that have deep moral consequences, and even when you try the best you can, you’re going to get a lot of those choices wrong. And you more often than not won’t know if you got them wrong or right. Maybe you should’ve picked another job, where you could do more good. Maybe you should’ve gone to grad school. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a new city. So I was selfishly, deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one. …and it really resonated. Everything else I try to do, there’s a little voice inside of me which says “Maybe the haters are right, maybe you’re stupid, maybe you’re just doing the easy things. Maybe you’re no good after all, maybe you’ll never be able to figure any of this out. Maybe you should just give up.” The Talmud is very clear: that voice is called the evil inclination, and it dwells in the left kidney. There is only one way to shut it off forever. I was ready. V. You might not be a masochist. But hospitals are sadists. They want to hear you beg. After I submitted the donation form, I was evaluated by a horde of indistinguishable women. They all had titles like “Transplant Coordinator”, “Financial Coordinator”, and “Patient Care Representative”. Several were social workers; one was a psychiatrist. They would see me through a buggy version of Zoom that caused various parts of their body to suddenly turn into the UCSF logo, and they all had questions like “Are you sure you want to do this?” and “Are you going to regret this later?” and “Is anyone pressuring you to do this?” and “Are you sure you want to do this?” After clearing that gauntlet came the tests. Blood tests - I think I must have given between 20 and 50 vials of blood throughout the screening process. Urine tests - both the normal kind where you pee in a cup, and a more involved kind where you have to store all your urine for 24 hours in a big jug, then take it to the lab. “Urinate into a jug” ought to be the easiest thing in the world, but some of the labs have overly complicated jugs that I, with my mere MD, couldn’t always get right - hence my experience accidentally pouring urine on myself in an Uber. Then came the big guns. Echocardiogram. MRI. One of my urine tests was slightly off, so I also got a nuclear kidney scan, where they injected radioactive liquid in me and monitored how long it took to come out the other end (I remember asking a friend “Can I use your bathroom? My urine might be slightly radioactive today, but it shouldn’t be enough to matter.”) Finally, five months after I originally applied, I got a phone call from the Transplant Coordinator. The test results were in, and . . . I had been rejected because I’d had mild childhood OCD. This was something I’d mentioned offhandedly during one of the psych evaluations. As a child, I used to touch objects in odd patterns that only made sense to me. I got diagnosed with OCD, put on SSRIs for a while, finally did therapy at age 15, hadn’t had any problems since. I still go back on SSRIs sometimes when I’m really stressed, and will grudgingly admit to the occasional odd-pattern-touching when no one’s looking. But it’s nothing anyone would know about if I didn’t tell them! It was mild even at age 15, and it’s been close-to-nonexistent for the past twenty years! Now I’m a successful psychiatrist who owns his own psychiatry practice and helps other people with the condition! I told them all this. They didn’t care. I asked them if there was anything I could do. They said maybe I could go to therapy for six months, then apply again. I asked them what kind of therapy was indicated for mild OCD that’s been in remission for twenty years. They sounded kind of surprised to learn there were different types of therapy and said whatever, just talk to someone or something. I asked them how frequent they thought the therapy needed to be. They sounded kind of surprised to learn that therapy could have different frequencies, and said, you know, therapy, the thing where you talk to someone. I asked them if they actually knew anything about OCD, psychotherapy, or mental health in general, or if they had just vaguely heard rumors that some people were bad and crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions, and that a ritual called “therapy” could absolve one of this impurity. They responded as politely as possible under the circumstances, but didn’t change their mind. I wasn’t going to waste an hour a week for six months, and spend thousands of dollars of my own extremely-not-reimbursed-by-UCSF money, to see a randomly-selected therapist for a condition I’d gotten over twenty years ago, just so I could apply again and get rejected a second time. This was one of the most infuriating and humiliating things that’s ever happened to me. We throw around a lot of terms like “stigma” and “paternalism”, and I’ve worked with patients who have dealt with all these issues (it’s UCSF in particular a surprising amount of the time!). But I was still surprised how much it hurt when it happened to me. Being denied the right to control your own body because of some meaningless diagnosis on a chart somewhere is surprisingly frustrating, even compared to things that should objectively be worse. I thought I was going to be able to do a good deed that I’d been fantasizing about for years, and some jerk administrator torpedoed my dreams because I had once, long ago, had mild mental health issues. So I gave up. I spent the next few weeks unleashing torrents of anti-UCSF abuse at anyone who would listen. This turned out to be very productive! When I was unleashing a torrent of anti-UCSF abuse to Josh Morrison of WaitlistZero, he asked if I’d tried other hospitals. I hadn’t. I’d assumed they were all in cahoots. But Josh said no, each hospital had their own evaluation process. Weill Cornell, a hospital in NYC, was one of the best transplant centers in the country, and had a reputation for fair and thoughtful pre-donor screening. Why didn’t I talk to them? NYC was far away, and I hate to travel, but I was just angry enough to accept. At this point I’d forgotten whatever good altruistic motivations I might have originally had and was fueled entirely by spite. Getting my kidney taken out somewhere else felt like it would be a sort of victory over UCSF. So I went for it. Cornell was lovely. They tried to do as much of the process as they could via Californian intermediaries, so that I only had to fly to New York twice. Their psychiatrist evaluated me, listened to me explain my weak history of OCD, then treated me like a reasonable adult who tells the truth and can handle his own medical decisions. They were concerned that I sometimes self-prescribed Lexapro to deal with anxiety. But we agreed on a compromise: I found another psychiatrist, let her give me the exact same prescription of Lexapro at a much higher cost to my insurance, and that resolved the problem. So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12. VI. I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep. There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked. Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery. A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country. . . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice. Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle. VII. In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%? Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one. This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process. 20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it. (obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint6.) So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it7. When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you! VIII. The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year. Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance. My kidney donation “mentor”8 Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+. (the libertarian in me would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal) This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to still have all of your organs. This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important. If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.9 Feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions about the process. 1Further perspective: I’m 38, which gives me a 2/million total chance of dying per day. So the likelihood that I would die during my kidney operation equals the likelihood that I would die during a randomly chosen two months of everyday life. 2Maybe, kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so close to background that it’s hard to adjust for possible confounders. So the first scientists to study the problem just drew a line through their high-radiation data points and extended it to the low radiation levels - ie if 1 Sievert caused one thousand extra cancers, probably 1 milli-Sievert would cause one extra cancer. This is called the Linear Dose No Threshold (LDNT) model, and has become a subject of intense and acrimonious debate. Some people think that at some very small dose, radiation stops being bad for you at all. Other people think maybe at low enough doses radiation is good for you - see this claim that the atomic bomb “elongated lifespan” in survivors far enough away from the blast. If this were true, CTs probably wouldn’t increase cancer risk at all. I didn’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to take a firm position, and I noticed eminent scientists on both sides, so I am using the more cautious estimate here. 3I told them I had an aunt who died of radiation-induced cancer. It’s true, but I feel grubby for bringing her into this; I thought doctors would be more likely to listen to an emotional story than cold logic. 4EAs have been debating the exact effectiveness of kidney donations for a long time. You can find good skeptical arguments by Jeff Kaufman and Derek Shiller, and good arguments in favor by Alexander Berger and Tom Ash. 5Outside of Philosophy 101 thought experiments, there’s a nonprofit that will often reimburse you for lost wages from your donation. 6Self-modifying into a person who can act boldly without social permission is a more general solution and has many other advantages. But the long version involves living a full life of accumulating moral wisdom, and the short version starts with removing guardrails that are there for good reasons. 7But here are some practical points you might not already appreciate: You shouldn’t have to pay much money. If, like me, you need to travel (eg to New York), kidney related charities will reimburse your travel costs (in theory, I haven’t yet proven this, and a few costs were illegible and I decided not to submit them).
Inline links: bumpy, 4, 5 - 7 extra years of life, improves quality of life, creates a “chain”, $5,000 - $10,000, 5, sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking, WaitlistZero, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7c71!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08cf5218-6398-4dfb-91a3-d5fc7989b754_765x642.png, polls, 5,000, 40,000, Manifest journalism panel, 6, filling out a form, 7, usual, 8, the, here, 9, 1, 2, Linear Dose No Threshold, this claim, 3, 4, Jeff Kaufman, Derek Shiller, Alexander Berger, Tom Ash, 5, 6, 7
So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12. VI. I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep. There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked. Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery. A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country. . . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice. Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle. VII. In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%? Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one. This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process. 20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it. (obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint6.) So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it7. When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you! VIII. The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year. Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance. My kidney donation “mentor”8 Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+. (the libertarian in me would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal) This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to still have all of your organs. This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important. If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.9 Feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions about the process. 1Further perspective: I’m 38, which gives me a 2/million total chance of dying per day. So the likelihood that I would die during my kidney operation equals the likelihood that I would die during a randomly chosen two months of everyday life. 2Maybe, kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so close to background that it’s hard to adjust for possible confounders. So the first scientists to study the problem just drew a line through their high-radiation data points and extended it to the low radiation levels - ie if 1 Sievert caused one thousand extra cancers, probably 1 milli-Sievert would cause one extra cancer. This is called the Linear Dose No Threshold (LDNT) model, and has become a subject of intense and acrimonious debate. Some people think that at some very small dose, radiation stops being bad for you at all. Other people think maybe at low enough doses radiation is good for you - see this claim that the atomic bomb “elongated lifespan” in survivors far enough away from the blast. If this were true, CTs probably wouldn’t increase cancer risk at all. I didn’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to take a firm position, and I noticed eminent scientists on both sides, so I am using the more cautious estimate here. 3I told them I had an aunt who died of radiation-induced cancer. It’s true, but I feel grubby for bringing her into this; I thought doctors would be more likely to listen to an emotional story than cold logic. 4EAs have been debating the exact effectiveness of kidney donations for a long time. You can find good skeptical arguments by Jeff Kaufman and Derek Shiller, and good arguments in favor by Alexander Berger and Tom Ash. 5Outside of Philosophy 101 thought experiments, there’s a nonprofit that will often reimburse you for lost wages from your donation. 6Self-modifying into a person who can act boldly without social permission is a more general solution and has many other advantages. But the long version involves living a full life of accumulating moral wisdom, and the short version starts with removing guardrails that are there for good reasons. 7But here are some practical points you might not already appreciate: You shouldn’t have to pay much money. If, like me, you need to travel (eg to New York), kidney related charities will reimburse your travel costs (in theory, I haven’t yet proven this, and a few costs were illegible and I decided not to submit them).
Inline links: polls, 5,000, 40,000, Manifest journalism panel, 6, filling out a form, 7, usual, 8, the, here, 9, 1, 2, Linear Dose No Threshold, this claim, 3, 4, Jeff Kaufman, Derek Shiller, Alexander Berger, Tom Ash, 5, 6, 7
Fellow psychiatrist and ACX reader Dr. Brown, who covered my patients while I was away.
Open Thread 300
October 30, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: I’m working on another round of ACX Grants. My current plan is to use mid-5 to low-6 figures of my own money but also solicit extra funding from others. If you might be interested in donating a large amount (≥ $50K) please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com so I can answer any questions you might have and get a sense of how much interest there is.
2: Speaking of ACX Grants, one of last round’s grants went to Lars Doucet and Will Jarvis to research Georgist land value taxes; they later started the company ValueBase. Now they’re trying to coordinate support for a potential upcoming land value tax in Detroit. If you live in Michigan and want to help, they want to talk to you about the best ways to contact your state representative. Please get in touch with them via this form.
Inline links: ValueBase, land value tax in Detroit, via this form
Open Thread 302
November 13, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Comment of the week is Seth Schoen’s description of a Wikipedia fight over the book A Void - the book is famous for not using the letter “e”, and the Wikipedians argued about whether it was appropriate for its article to operate under the same constraint. See also Melvin’s response.
Inline links: a Wikipedia fight over the book, Melvin’s response
Open Thread 303
November 20, 2023 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Some good comments on the Rene Girard book review. Given the generally anti-Girard reception, I was grateful for the few people who stepped up to defend or explain him. Skaladom recommends a professional Girard exegete named Johnathan Bi (lectures here). Neil Scott notes that Sam Kriss has a recent Girard article. Deiseach on memetic crisis and Girard’s theology, Zbigniew Lukasiak on the social usefulness of religion, and Hal Johnson suggesting other books. And thanks to Bill Benzon for highlighting that Tyler Cowen considers Girard one of the top twenty thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. I would love to know more about Tyler’s interpretation of Girard and the single-victim process. Maybe in the context of recent events?
Inline links: the Rene Girard book review, anti-Girard reception, recommends, lectures here, notes, a recent Girard article, memetic crisis, Girard’s theology, the social usefulness of religion, suggesting other books, for highlighting, considers Girard
2: And some good comments on the ketamine post. Thomas Reilly says the study was underpowered. Awais Aftab compares to a recent very positive trial of ketamine vs. ECT. Eremolalos on a meta-analysis. Nate Praschan argues that anaesthetics might block ketamine directly.
Inline links: says the study was underpowered, a recent very positive trial of ketamine vs. ECT, on a meta-analysis, anaesthetics might block ketamine directly
Open Thread 304
November 27, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Quests and Requests update: Alexander Putilin has offered to take point on the EEG replication experiment. If you’re interested in helping, please read his pitch.
Inline links: Quests and Requests, his pitch
Open Thread 305
December 04, 2023 · Original source
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1: Some good comments on the monosemanticity post, including dyoshida on simulation, johnny_lin’s attempt to gamify explaining AI, theahura on the analogy to polygenicity, sclmlw on cell signaling pathways, bestgreatestsuper on manifolds. And Benji York links a post on 11-dimensional abstract structures in the human brain. Many of these seem to be getting at the same idea where there are evolved systems scientists have so far failed to really understand - AIs, the genome, cellular signaling pathways - and maybe the same idea of a polysemantic → monosemantic reduction will help with all of them. I would love to see a longer treatment of this by someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Inline links: the monosemanticity post, on simulation, gamify explaining AI, the analogy to polygenicity, cell signaling pathways, on manifolds, 11-dimensional abstract structures in the human brain
2: In my defense of EA, I said of its failures (primarily SBF) that “I’m not sure they cancel out the effect of saving one life, let alone 200,000”. A friend convinced me that this was an unfair exaggeration. There are purported exchange rates between money and lives, destroying billions in value is pretty bad by all of them, and there are knock-on effects on social trust from fraud that suggest its negative effects should be valued even higher. I regret this sentence, no longer stand by it, and have added it to my Mistakes page.
Inline links: my defense of EA, purported exchange rates between money and lives
Open Thread 310
January 08, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: In my recent post In The Long Run, We’re All Dad, I said the best evidence suggests names have a causal, and not just correlational, effect on life outcomes. An alert reader sent me a Fryer and Levitt paper that claims the opposite. They found that distinctively black names (eg “DeShawn”) may decrease someone’s chance of getting a job interview in controlled resume experiments, but that this doesn’t seem to affect very-long-run life outcomes. The authors argue this makes sense: suppose someone named DeShawn didn’t get a certain job interview because a racist interviewer was able to infer based on his name that he was black. If his name was John and he did get the job interview, the racist interviewer would directly observe that he was black and still not hire him. These are the best-studied type of distinctive name, and plausibly the evidence for other types stands or falls along with them.
Inline links: In The Long Run, We’re All Dad, a Fryer and Levitt paper that claims the opposite
1: I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals. This would require anywhere between 10 - 60 minutes of work (depending on how thoroughly you wanted to review it) looking over one or two grant proposals in your area and telling me how likely they are to work. If this is you, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. Please don’t apply if you’re involved in any of the grant proposals under review. Update: I’ve already gotten enough volunteers for this, thank you!
Open Thread 311
January 15, 2024 · Original source
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Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Last week I posted a subscribers-only book review of Cyropaedia. Several people commented that two days earlier, the Substack Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf also reviewed the same book (the commenters politely omitted “and did a better job”). Highly recommended, whether you read my version or not.
Inline links: a subscribers-only book review of, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, reviewed the same book
Open Thread 312
January 22, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Corrections on links: the pro-Palestine slogan “from the river to the sea” was banned only in Berlin, not all of Germany, and has since been unbanned. And our resident Genealogian critiques the claimed line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden.
Inline links: links, only in Berlin, unbanned, critiques the claimed line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden
3: Thanks to everyone who reminded me to go through the moderation backlog. I’ve permabanned Nika Mavrody, ChrisJ, NS, SyxnFxlm, ChickenFriedSteak, Emmanuel Florac, Jazzme, MarkS, Marty Khan, SunSphere, Cohen The Barbarian, Der Durchwanderer, Purpleopolis, Earl D, asciilifeform, Arnold Fare, Morgan Warstler, Joker Catholic, and BankerAtLarge, and temp-banned Artist Tyrant, Beowulf888 ,Russel T Pott for a month each. Please continue to report any comments you think detract from the discussion by clicking the … symbol on the bottom right of the comment, then “Report” on the menu that pops up.
Inline links: Nika Mavrody, ChrisJ, NS, SyxnFxlm, ChickenFriedSteak, Emmanuel Florac, Jazzme, MarkS, Marty Khan, SunSphere, Cohen The Barbarian, Der Durchwanderer, Purpleopolis, Earl D, asciilifeform, Arnold Fare, Morgan Warstler, Joker Catholic, BankerAtLarge, Artist Tyrant, Beowulf888, Russel T Pott
Open Thread 313
January 29, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Correction to Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders: if schizophrenia is 80-20 genetic, that means genes matter 2x as much as the environment, not the more intuitive 4x, see here for more. This somewhat invalidates my simulations, but in a way that makes my point stronger rather than weaker, so whatever. See also this commenter’s more sophisticated model.
Inline links: Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders, see here for more, this commenter’s more sophisticated model
2: Correction to Psychopolitics Of Trauma: The study I cited on people making more errors in political reasoning failed to replicate (more discussion here). I cited that as an example of a larger literature about political reasoning errors (see eg here), but for all I know that larger literature doesn’t replicate either. I do think that the Wason task (which does replicate) suggests context-dependent reasoning errors like these should be common. See also Part V of this post for more on how I think of these kinds of questions.
Inline links: Psychopolitics Of Trauma, failed to replicate, here, here, the Wason task, Part V of this post
24
January 30, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 317
February 26, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Ben Todd tried to reproduce my calculations about GPT-6 and found it will only take 0.1% of the world’s computers to train, not 10%. I haven’t double-checked his work or figure out where we disagree, but it sounds like a more reasonable (though still immense) estimate.
Inline links: tried to reproduce my calculations about GPT-6
Book Review Contest Rules 2024
March 02, 2024 · Original source
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 last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Inline links: last year’s finalists and winners, 1, 2, 3
(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 - 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.)
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
March 07, 2024 · Original source
We got 351 proposals for ACX Grants, but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317.
Inline links: ACX Grants
The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In our last impact market test, some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well.
Inline links: our last impact market test
Convert a hybrid car to chip wood and generate electricity. David Denkenberger works on projects to help humankind survive after global technological collapse. This is one of them: he wants $25K to convert hybrid cars into electrical generators. We didn’t fund this because we’re not sure how a successful result translates to anyone except David Denkenberger knowing how to do this in the case of a technological collapse, but I would be happy to buy an impact cert if someone believed they could make this public enough that the average small community of survivors would be able to take advantage of it. …and 39 others, hopefully more by the time you read this. Even if you’re not interested in investing, I still think it’s fun to browse through some of these and see what kinds of wacky ideas people have. III. Technical Details Remember, an impact market is like a stock market or VC ecosystem for charity. Investors fund projects, and then big philanthropists play the role of an IPO or final acquirer, funding successful projects in a way that gives value back to the investors. A toy example: Suppose I rejected a proposal to grant $50,000 to lobby for an animal rights law in Norway - not because I’m against animal rights, but because I believe the lobbying won’t work. You disagree with me and think this could work really well, so you invest $25,000 to buy 50% of its shares, and someone else buys the other half. The team lobbies for the law. I was wrong about their proposal, the law gets passed, and it’s great. You sell the impact certificates to an animal rights charity, who decide that if they were trying to get a law like this passed ex ante, they would be willing to spend up to $75,000 on it. They have a good sense of this because they fund animal rights proposals all the time. They pay $75,000 to the holders of the certificates, so you and the other buyer each get $37,500, a 50% profit. Obviously this depends on having big philanthropists willing to cooperate with this new system. Our current impact market has five partners: The Long Term Future Fund, The EA Infrastructure Fund, The Survival And Flourishing Fund, The Animal Welfare Fund, and future rounds of ACX Grants. That means if you buy an impact certificate today, you can try selling it to one of those funders later, after the project is done. Each of these charities has specific things they fund, so you might want to check their past history before trusting them to buy one of your certificates. Impact markets are pretty new. We ran a test round last year and it went well, but this round is a bit more complicated and has some new moving parts. Along with the issue where you won’t get real money back, please be aware of the following possible risks: You think your project did great work, but I (or our other funders) don’t find it interesting, don’t buy it, and the certificates go to $0. There are only five funders, and most of them are in pretty specific areas, so you might have only one or two possible buyers, and if they disagree with you, you’re out of luck.
Inline links: Convert a hybrid car to chip wood and generate electricity, The Long Term Future Fund, The EA Infrastructure Fund, The Survival And Flourishing Fund, The Animal Welfare Fund, a test round
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers
March 08, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 319
March 11, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Updates on the 2023 Forecasting Contest:
Inline links: 2023 Forecasting Contest
Open Thread 320
March 18, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Update on the 2023 Forecasting Contest: We’re now working on sending everyone their scores. You should either have already gotten this email (from autoastralcodexten@gmail.com) or get it sometime in the next few days. Thanks to Leon for making this happen.
Inline links: Forecasting Contest
3: The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including growing blood vessels in the lab, an online psychiatry/psychology journal, and a swarm of robotic bees. In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall ACX Grants impact market is here, and my explanation of what’s going on is here.
Inline links: growing blood vessels in the lab, online psychiatry/psychology journal, a swarm of robotic bees, ACX Grants impact market is here, here
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFM Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/va9fsFSYcrWRkmFpH/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-9 Notes: RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFM, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/va9fsFSYcrWRkmFpH/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-9
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
Inline links: here
hmm answers the challenge:
Inline links: hmm
Simon objects that although it was hard to find the exact civets responsible for SARS, we did later find that lots of civet handlers had SARS antibodies (even though they didn’t remember getting sick).
Inline links: Simon objects
Open Thread 327
April 28, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: More meetups this week, in Istanbul, Edinburgh, Manchester, Phoenix, Fort Meade, Brooklyn, Hanoi, and New Orleans. And Sao Paulo has been added to the list. More information, including times and dates, here.
Inline links: here
2: Reminder that the due date for this year’s Book Review Contest is May 5, ie next Sunday. You can find where to submit at the link.
Inline links: this year’s Book Review Contest
A Theoretical "Case Against Education"
May 23, 2024 · Original source
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Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
[EDIT: Here’s a claim that this image might be false]
Inline links: Here’s a claim
18: Updates on the SB1047 AI regulation bill: the bill passed the California Senate by a 32-1 vote (remember that tech Twitter is not real life!). It still has to get through California’s Assembly, but forecasters expect it to succeed:
Inline links: the SB1047 AI regulation bill
19: In my review of Origins of Woke, some people suggested that testing whether score on an employment test correlated with performance on the job might get confounded due to Berkson’s Paradox. The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth.
Inline links: Origins of Woke, The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth
Open Thread 336
July 01, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Now I’ve also released the new version of Unsong as an ebook on Amazon and Gumroad, both $4.99. Yes, somehow the Amazon hardcopy is my pen name and the ebook is my real name, probably I made a mistake, probably I’ll get it corrected soon.
Inline links: Amazon, Gumroad
2: New subscriber only post, with bonus questions from Thursday’s mock debate post.
Inline links: subscriber only post,
Open Thread 339
July 22, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: I'm interested in expanding my biennial local ballot post into a community-wide effort to get an ACX slate for major US cities. Current plan is to ask the 5-10 biggest meetup groups to research for their city sometime in the autumn, then post a week or two before the election. This would probably be SF, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, LA, NYC, Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago. The main things I want to know now: when does your state release its voter information packet? Do other states have enough things on the ballot to keep this interesting, or is California unique there? Do these meetup groups feel up to working on this? Does anyone have any other suggestions or advice?
Inline links: biennial local ballot post
Open Thread 340
July 29, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Moral Particle on why it’s easy to circumvent Ban The Box.
Inline links: why it’s easy to circumvent Ban The Box
Linch with a funny story on how the 1906 SF earthquake affected the Chinese-American community.
Inline links: a funny story
Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers
August 01, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 343
August 19, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: New subscriber-only post this week, How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures?, on those lists speculating whether Jesus/Napoleon/Mohammed/whoever was the most important person in history.
Inline links: How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures?
3: Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s post Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? I did see a lot of commenters (who apparently hadn’t read it) loudly assume that it said “because obesity causes all diseases”. I want to emphasize that as best I can interpret the existing research, it’s not because obesity directly causes these diseases (see here for more discussion). Other people were a little more sophisticated and suggested it was because starvation / calorie restriction cures all diseases. I’m skeptical of this one too. Even if you’re in fact starving on Ozempic, it works by sending your body its biochemical “I’m full” signal - so your body is in the fullness biochemical state rather than the starving biochemical state. This isn’t a knockdown argument, because your body has lots of different signals and the full vs. starving states are multifaceted, but I would bet against this one too.
Inline links: Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?, see here for more discussion
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[a t]gm ail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFJ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xsAqbxvT8PD8kCgcr/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-5jau Notes: RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFJ, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xsAqbxvT8PD8kCgcr/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-5jau
Contact: Giulio Starace Contact Info: giulio[dot]starace[at ]gmail[do t]com Time: Saturday, October 19th, 03:00 PM Location: Roma Termini, Via Marsala entrance Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FHJWG23+P4M Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IqVk [ignore this part] 1B8RwgxHnm1u6fgeQA Notes: Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not ‘the typical ACX reader’, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.! We are a very casual and laid back group.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FHJWG23+P4M
Contact: Linas Contact Info: linaskondrackis[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 22nd, 03:00 PM Location: We'll be in Lukiškių Aikštė. Look for a small group and a guy holding an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G67M7QC+Q9 Group Link: https://discord.gg/udTt5QSX Notes: Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not ‘the typical ACX reader’, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. Bonus points if you tag yourself on LessWrong so we know you're coming / thinking about it.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G67M7QC+Q9, https://discord.gg/udTt5QSX
Open Thread 345
September 02, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
12: A while back I wrote a piece saying people needed to be clearer about what their “GET TOUGH” plans for dealing with mentally ill homeless people really meant. Later, Charles Lehman wrote a response describing his plan and arguing why it’s necessary. Most recently, Ozy has written a response to Charles, basically expressing fear that Charles’ plan will unnecessarily commit a bunch of harmless well-functioning people. I bet Charles’ response will be that no, this isn’t what he wants at all, to which my response will be that this is why you need to be clearer about what you mean. That is, I’m sure Charles wants to only commit people who need commitment, and not commit people who don’t, but he hasn’t explained the mechanism by which a fallible court system and medical system will ensure that this actually happens, and those are the kinds of details that I’m most interested in.
Inline links: I wrote a piece saying people needed to be clearer, wrote a response, Ozy has written a response to Charles
PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.
Inline links: PolymorphicWetware
John Schilling says that neither side in Ukraine has established air superiority - Ukraine because it barely has an air force, Russia because the West gave Ukraine cutting-edge anti-air defenses. This is almost unique among major modern wars, and the lack of air power pushes ground conflicts back towards the World War I equilibrium.
Inline links: John Schilling
Open Thread 348
September 23, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2024
September 26, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates
September 30, 2024 · Original source
Each election year, I’ve shared how I plan to vote in local elections. This year I want to scale up and produce voter guides for all the big US cities/states with a critical mass of ACX readers.
Inline links: I’ve shared
I’d like a paragraph or two of reasoning (can be longer if there’s a really complicated issue) plus a recommendation (the recommendation can be “we’re not sure”). See my 2022 post for examples.
Inline links: my 2022 post
Open Thread 350
October 07, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: I sent Book Review Contest finalists and Honorable Mentionees an email requesting a short biography to use in the announcement post. But because I foolishly included the word “congratulations”, many people said it got caught in their spam filter. If you’re a finalist and didn’t get the email, either retrieve it from your spam filter, or just send me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) a short bio of yourself like the ones here, including however you want me to publicly list your name (pseudonym? etc). I’ll announce winners Friday.
Inline links: here
2: Los Angeles is a late addition to the Ballots Everywhere meetups - they’re holding their meeting this Wednesday, October 9, with a followup planned for next Wednesday. For more information, see the Times and Places post.
Inline links: see the Times and Places post
Open Thread 351
October 13, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Ballot meetups in Austin, Boston, Chicago, LA, Oakland, and SF this week, see here for details.
Inline links: here
Open Thread 354
November 04, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Comment of the week is Graham on the Prop 36 post - he argues that the reason cops aren’t enforcing the existing misdemeanor penalty for shoplifting (up to six months in jail) is that by the time it gets through the DAs, this is reduced to “a stern talking to”, and it’s not worth cops’ time to arrest anyone who won’t be punished. Therefore, in order to get the six months in jail that’s already on the books, we apparently have to increase the law to three years in jail. I appreciate this perspective, but it only leaves me more confused - for example, didn’t San Francisco recall its soft-on-crime DA and replace him with a tough-on-crime DA who promised to throw the book at shoplifters? Don’t these charts from the San Francisco DA show that most arrests lead to charges, and the problem is almost entirely that most reports don’t lead to arrests? I still don’t feel like I understand the dynamics behind why our current laws can’t be used to arrest and imprison shoplifters.
Inline links: Graham on the Prop 36 post, these charts
2: Responses to my Trump anti-endorsement by (among others) Richard Ngo and Eric Rasmusen.
Inline links: my Trump anti-endorsement, Richard Ngo, Eric Rasmusen
How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?
November 20, 2024 · Original source
Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images.
Inline links: I challenged
If you want to try the test yourself before seeing the answers, go here. The form doesn't grade you, so before you press "submit" you should check your answers against this key.
Inline links: here, this key
AI. This one was generated by another ACX reader, Jack Galler.
Inline links: Jack Galler
Open Thread 358
December 02, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 361
December 23, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: In case you missed the post, there’s a new ACX survey you can take. Deadline Jan 5. Expect me to continue to bother you about that irregularly until then.
Inline links: a new ACX survey you can take
Open Thread 365
January 20, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Comments from Links: Vlaakith Outrance on A16Z returns, Erusian on dominance within party systems, Hadi Khan corrects my AI training cost numbers (but it ends up not mattering much), and someone linked Alice Evans’ posts on Turkey and fertility (Lyman Stone supposedly discusses this too, though the post is paywalled). And in response to the story about the Chinese warlord misunderstanding basketball, a Jewish friend relates a suspiciously similar legend:
Inline links: on A16Z returns, dominance within party systems, corrects my AI training cost numbers, Turkey, fertility, the post
[EDIT: update on Rav Kanievsky’s level of basketball knowledge]
Inline links: update on Rav Kanievsky’s level of basketball knowledge
Metaculus Forecasting Contest
January 20, 2025 · Original source
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1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals
February 07, 2025 · Original source
My personal favorite as the only Trump administration official to have commented on this blog (JD Vance only lurks – sad!) O’Neill, previously a Peter Thiel lieutenant, has worked in causes from seasteading to anti-aging; now he’s taking the #2 spot at HHS under RFK. He famously proposed that the FDA consider only safety (and not efficacy) when approving drugs. Given that he hasn’t been chosen for FDA, that’s probably not on the cards, but here are some things we hope O’Neill considers:
Inline links: the only Trump administration official to have commented on this blog, only lurks, consider only safety
Compensating Organ Donors / End Kidney Deaths Act: Both of us co-writing this piece (Scott Alexander of ACX, Josh Morrison of 1DaySooner) have donated kidneys. We’re proud of our decision, but it’s not enough - waiting for people like us has resulted in a kidney shortage that kills a thousand Americans per month. Everyone knows the solution - compensating organ donors - but there hasn’t been enough political will to overcome the “ick” factor and make it happen. O’Neill could change that. He’s been speaking out in favor of compensation since 2009. And the time is right: Representative Nicole Malliotakis has introduced a bipartisan bill to provide $50,000 in refundable tax credits for people who donate kidneys to strangers. This paper found that a similar policy could eventually net 11,500 extra donors per year - which, aside from saving 11,500 people from end-stage kidney disease, could save the government $1 billion. O’Neill could boost this bill by getting it into the Executive Budget released with the State of the Union.
Inline links: donated, kidney shortage, been speaking out in favor of compensation since 2009, Representative Nicole Malliotakis, This paper, save, $1 billion
Open Thread 369
February 16, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Correction to the Cruz woke science article: I conjectured that unrelated science grants contained a sentence about women and minorities to please the Biden administration, but even that was granting the Trump narrative too much. Commenters pointed out that grants being judged on the “broader impact criteria” - a seven pronged list including outreach and benefit to women/minorities - actually dates back to 1980 and neither Biden nor the current round of wokeness was involved. And not a correction, but a clarification - several people suggested that even 40% of grants being “woke” was bad. The article didn’t intend to claim that 40% of NSF grants were woke - only 40% of the NSF grants that Ted Cruz and the Commerce Department had previously identified as woke. Those in turn are about 5% of all grants, so (assuming Cruz didn’t have false negatives) only about 2% of total grants were woke.
Inline links: the Cruz woke science article, actually dates back to 1980
ErrorMargin is a quant trader. He says he has "only dabbled in predictions before, but did this round with a friend and put way more effort into explicit modeling". He has a new blog (with one post) at errormargin.com, and says "I'd love to receive any emails from ACX readers to me@errormargin.com. I'm always happy to hang out with fellow forecasting nerds or rationalists in and around London."
Inline links: me@errormargin.com
Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025
February 28, 2025 · Original source
Otherwise, the usual rules apply. 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 last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Inline links: last year’s finalists and winners, 1, 2, 3
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 you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (most people don’t take me up on this, but Lars Doucet and Daniel Böttger did.)
Inline links: Lars Doucet, Daniel Böttger
(does this mean you can’t say something like “This movie about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - 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.)
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2025 - Call For Organizers
March 05, 2025 · Original source
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 1:00 PM Location: Cafe Modern at Galataport, Istanbul Modern Museum Entrance Floor Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHC2XGM+94 Notes: I organize this meeting with the EA Istanbul Group. ACX readers, AI Safety and EA people, all of you are warmly welcomed. If possible, let me know that you will be attending by dropping an email or replying on LessWrong. I will be sitting outside of the cafe - weather permitting- with a ACX Meeting sign on the table. Looking forward to meeting old friends and new ones!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GHC2XGM+94
Contact: Daniele Contact Info: daniele[period]denuntiis[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 4:00 PM Location: Via Martin Luther King, 100, 24127 Bergamo BG. We'll be hanging out near the Cafe, I'll bring a sign or something recognizable. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X Notes: Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not ‘the typical ACX reader’, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. RSVPs appreciated but not required.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X
Contact: Tess Contact Info: rationalottawa[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 18th, 7:00 PM Location: "The Penalty Box" private room at Hometown Sports Bar & Grill, 1525 Bank St, Ottawa, K1H7Z1, see the yellow ACX sign on the door to the private room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q698JJ+FM Group Link: https://discord.gg/NCx [remove this bit] GNU5a9z Notes: Come on out to encounter ACX readers, and to find out what our Rational Ottawa weekly meetup group is like/is all about! Past years have seen attendance range from 1-2 dozen at these events, and I would expect that to continue. Please feel welcome to join us even if you're not quite sure you fit the crowd, or feel awkward about doing meetups! All appetizers to be provided by the group!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87Q698JJ+FM
Open Thread 376
April 07, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: Comment of the week: Jenn has seen Yves Klein’s all-blue paintings and thinks they’re amazing, even if you’re a jaded modern with plenty of previous exposure to blue things.
Inline links: thinks they’re amazing
3: This week’s meetups include Canberra, Munich, Milan, Budapest, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Birmingham, Detroit, Charlotte, Salt Lake, and Toronto. See the list for smaller cities and details. And if you attended and have opinions, there's now a feedback form available here.
Inline links: See the list, here
25
April 17, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 382
May 19, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: ACX meetups this week in Oxford, Shanghai, and Austin. See the post for details.
Inline links: the post
Open Thread 384
June 02, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: ACX meetup this week in Berkeley (Wed 6:30, 2740 Telegraph). I’ll probably advertise this as a main post tomorrow, but just getting it out there early.
Inline links: meetup
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021, the second in early 2024. In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first.
Inline links: late 2021, early 2024, one-year updates
No update received this year, but see the 2022 update here.
Inline links: here
Among the most interesting are a replication of The Illusion Of Moral Decline (I wrote a post criticizing the original study here, but on purely conceptual grounds - I never doubted that the actual work was done honestly and correctly) and of the shared visual Mandela Effect, where everyone seems to collectively believe the same false things about visual signs like corporate logos (eg that there was a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom symbol). Both replicated fine.
Inline links: a replication of The Illusion Of Moral Decline, here, the shared visual Mandela Effect
Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
July 03, 2025 · Original source
[Original thread here: Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know]
Inline links: Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Sasha Gusev of The Infinitesimal, a leading critic of twin studies and the person whose views most inspired the post, kindly replied. His reply has four parts - I’ll address each individually. First, GxE interactions:
Inline links: The Infinitesimal, kindly replied
And maybeiamwrong2 here gives another good explanation of Gusev’s theory of interactions and heritability.
Inline links: maybeiamwrong2 here gives another good explanation
Open Thread 389
July 07, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Highlights from the comments on this month’s links:
Inline links: this month’s links
Higher motherhood penalty for daughters than sons: How does family size contribute?
Inline links: How does family size contribute?
Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
July 18, 2025 · Original source
As a final thought, I wonder if this experience is generalizable. The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople? One theory is that it’s all signaling, be it class signaling by the patrons, or signaling for cultural priesthood. But assuming these are genuine aesthetic preferences, as I’m inclined to believe, what then?
Inline links: cultural priesthood
To push the idea further, in an age when the process becomes democratically cheap — even if superficially — via generative AI, perhaps we should be less alarmed about the confusion and more about the boredom. Maybe that’s where my nagging doubt comes from when imagining the deep utopia. Again, as Eco puts it, “This is the America ... where Good, Art, Fairytale, and History, unable to become flesh, must at least become Plastic. The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. … Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is hell or heaven, and so will consume new promises.”
Inline links: deep utopia
[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]
Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)
July 24, 2025 · Original source
ACX Grants is a microgrants program that helps fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. Click the links to see the 2022 and 2024 cohorts.
Inline links: 2022, 2024
You can read the full list here and here, and the most recent updates from each project here.
Inline links: here, here, here
We’re running another ACX Grants round!
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Commentariat is defined as the 24,485 individuals other than Scott who have contributed to the corpus of work of Scott’s blog posts, chiefly by leaving comments at the bottom of those posts. It is well understood (by the Commentariat themselves) that they are the best comments section anywhere on the internet, and have been for some time. This review takes it as a given that the ACX Commentariat outclasses all of its pale imitators across the web, so I won’t compare the ACX Commentariat to e.g. reddit. The real question is whether our glory days are behind us – specifically whether the ACX Commentariat of today has lost its edge compared to the SSC Commentariat of pre-2021.
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. Setting Out the Case for Decline There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist? It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not). To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021. In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician). The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: writes, writes, this one, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!04Ny!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ab1e15-6e36-4500-8980-ad652af543c6_745x421.png, The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
The ACX-era begins in 2021 and is highlighted in green. You can see engagement starts lower than the SSC steady-state of 400-600 comments per post (maybe more like 300-400 per post) but increases over time to at least that level by 2024, getting close to the peak engagement era. In one of life’s small ironies, Scott wrote Why Do I Suck? at close to the lowest period of engagement the blog had experienced for nearly a decade. My key conclusion is that someone who says they preferred what the comments section used to be like is not (necessarily) just being curmudgeonly – something really did happen between pre-2016 SSC and post-2016 SSC, and then again between SSC as a whole and ACX as a whole, which caused a lot of people to disengage from the comments section. Furthermore, we would expect engagement to track quality quite closely (because people don’t want to engage with a bad comment section), and so a very strong hypothesis for an otherwise unexplained drop in comment engagement is a corresponding drop in Commentariat quality. Interestingly, after a few years of lower engagement than steady-state SSC, engagement with ACX is trending upwards at the moment. If you were optimistic, you might even say that the early signs are that 2025 is showing the first bit of the fast-growth section of a sigmoidal adoption curve. If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year, so mark that in your calendars. Commentariat Quality – A Deep Dive ‘Professional’ reviewers – a thousand curses heaped upon their name – often rely on vague and idiosyncratic measures of quality. This may be appropriate for trivialities like literature and music, but when it comes to important things like the ACX Commentariat I’d prefer to follow good Commentariat norms and use clearly defined objective criteria in my review. I’ve therefore broken down comment quality into four key factors that, in my view, define the Commentariat’s unique character: Depth of engagement with a topic – When the comment section is good, it is characterised by people taking time to uncover each other’s views and identify genuine disagreement, rather than just rehearsing tribally-coded talking points or making incendiary ‘drive-by’ comments and disappearing.
Open Thread 393
August 04, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Fall Meetups Everywhere - Call for Organizers
August 06, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 394
August 11, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: This is your last chance to apply for this year’s ACX Grants. Deadline is end-of-day PST this Friday.
Inline links: apply for this year’s ACX Grants
4: In the post on embryo selection, I mentioned that Herasight criticized Orchid's Alzheimer's predictor. A representative of Orchid reached out to say they stood by their methodology:
Inline links: the post on embryo selection, criticized
Open Thread 395
August 18, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Thanks to everyone who posted comments on the dating review (except for people who posted bad comments, who I have banned). I think the prize for the most ACX-stereotype-fulfilling response is this person who is using it as an AI benchmark. Since there was a spirited debate about the author, I’ve created a prediction market here.
Inline links: the dating review, this person who is using it as an AI benchmark, here
4: Thanks to everyone who posted comments on the amyloid review. Chris Strutheo has created a prediction market here about whether the author’s bet will pan out. This time the most ACX-stereotype-fulfilling response is the nominative determinism angle:
Inline links: the amyloid review, here
Open Thread 396
August 25, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Comments of the week: Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post [EDIT: Response from reviewer here]. And some more discussion of people being one-shotted by works of art: hottakergeneral claims that Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”. Fact check: although Stuck’s Wotan looks eerily like Hitler, GPT-5 thinks any theory of casual resemblance is speculative and that there are other explanations for Hitler’s style.
Inline links: Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post, here, Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”, Stuck’s Wotan looks, GPT-5 thinks
3: In 2021, I wrote a blog post on how the best-supported treatment for insomnia was a therapy called CBTi, how it should be easily deliverable by app, but how the only good CBT-i app was prescription-only and cost $900. I challenged people to create normal non-prescription CBTi apps at normal prices. Now after four years, somebody has taken me up on the first half of the problem - a company called SheepSleep, working with a Stanford insomnia expert, has a CBTi therapy app for $298 per month (treatment usually takes 1-2 months). You can see more at gnsheep.com. They are offering ACX readers a discount with the code “ACX” (for first 50 people), and the founder asks any interested clinicians, orgs, or investors to reach out to her at luomei@stanford.edu. I still think someone should invent the $5 version, and would like to hear from anyone working on this so I can try to help them.
Inline links: a blog post, gnsheep.com
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Anslem Namonye Contact Info: anslemnamonye[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 6:00 PM Location: National ICT Innovation Hub, Nakawa, Kampala, Uganda. We'll be meeting inside the main reception area of the National ICT Innovation Hub. Once you're at the entrance, look out for a sign labeled "ACX MEETUP - Kampala", and I’ll be wearing a White shirt. If you need help finding the place or have any questions, feel free to call or WhatsApp me at +256 761 951 019 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GGJ8JH7+JH Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DII [remove this bit] k5Ru1QxxLrBAfvIIYmi Notes: Feel free to bring a friend or two! Light refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP via WhatsApp so we can plan seating and snacks accordingly: +256 761 951 019 Come with curiosity and an open mind. We welcome both first-timers and long-time ACX readers.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6GGJ8JH7+JH
Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 3:00 PM Location: Kadıkoy Yeni Iskele Kahve Dunyası ( the ferry pier building that we take ferries from Kadıkoy to Eminonu or Karakoy. Second floor, upstairs bookstore and cafe) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+45 Notes: ACX readers, old friends, new friends welcome for an easy afternoon coffee. Please contact me at ozgeco@yahoo.com for any help request. Looking forward to seeing you soon.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+45
Contact: Tess Contact Info: rationalottawa[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 12th, 7:00 PM Location: We're meeting at the local park of the Ottawa organizer, Tess, called "South Keys Landing Community Garden" on google maps. We'll be in the park gazebo and will put up a yellow ACX sign, and I, Tess, will be identifiable in a black cowboy hat. If it gets too dark and buggy, we will retreat indoors at 307 Southcrest Pvt. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q698CJ+3X Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalottawa, Attend a meetup to receive an invite to our discord! Notes: Come on out to encounter ACX readers, and to find out what our Rational Ottawa weekly meetup group is like/is all about! Past years have seen attendance range from 1-2 dozen at these events, and I would expect that to continue. Please join us even if you're not quite sure you fit the crowd, or feel awkward about doing meetups!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87Q698CJ+3X, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalottawa
Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
The ACX Commentariat, by Alex Bates. Alex is a statistician and health economist based near Oxford in the UK. In his review, Alex predicted that engagement with ACX would peak in July this year. Sadly this did not come to pass, in part because the Commentariat review itself dragged the average down. In his spare time, Alex is writing a novel in the hitherto-untapped genre of ‘Stat-Fic’, a thrilling blend of statistics and fantasy which is sure to find a vast mainstream audience upon publication.
Inline links: The ACX Commentariat
1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is Palace Fiction (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days.
Inline links: Joan of Arc, Palace Fiction, As Our Days
2nd: Alpha School, by Edward Nevraumont. Edward also wrote one of last year’s finalists (Silver Age Marvel Comics)1. Now that he’s no longer anonymous, he’s going to write a post on his blog responding to the review comments (712 of them!), as well as a follow-up post on what he has learned about Alpha in the six months since he submitted his review (including the Spring and Fall MAP results for his kids). Here is the landing page with more details for ACX readers who are interested.
Inline links: Alpha School, Silver Age Marvel Comics, 1, landing page
Open Thread 405
October 27, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Meetups this week include Haifa, Huntsville, and Prague - see the meetup post for more information.
Inline links: the meetup post
3: In Highlights From The Comments On Fatima, I mentioned someone who analogized the problem of evil in religion to “the problem of non-characteristicness” in physics, but said I couldn’t credit them properly because I’d lost the link and forgotten who it was. It was Gumphus.
Inline links: Highlights From The Comments On Fatima, It was Gumphus
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
Everyone who studies biochem asks themselves at some point “Why do cells need such long signaling pathways?” - ie so many chemicals whose only point is to activate other chemicals and so on in a chain, until the last chemical in the chain makes something happen. If I understand this paper right, it’s claiming that if each chemical has enough positive and negative inputs, this is analogous to a neural network, capable of making primitive decisions about cellular behavior. I asked some real biologists, who were not nearly as impressed with this thesis as I was and said that although these chains do help set cellular behavior, the analogy between levels of a chemical and the activation function of a neuron was too weak to carry so much weight. I still wonder whether insights from mechanistic interpretability could help us understand networks like these.
Inline links: this paper
Everyone who studies biochem asks themselves at some point “Why do cells need such long signaling pathways?” - ie so many chemicals whose only point is to activate other chemicals and so on in a chain, until the last chemical in the chain makes something happen. If I understand this paper right, it’s claiming that if each chemical has enough positive and negative inputs, this is analogous to a neural network, capable of making primitive decisions about cellular behavior. I asked some real biologists, who were not nearly as impressed with this thesis as I was and said that although these chains do help set cellular behavior, the analogy between levels of a chemical and the activation function of a neuron was too weak to carry so much weight. I still wonder whether insights from mechanistic interpretability could help us understand networks like these. 9: Political Symbols and Social Order: Confederate Monuments And Performative Violence in the Post-Reconstruction US South. Study claims that Confederate monuments reduced racial violence by serving as a substitute for it; when there was a Confederate monument in town, Southerners felt less need to enforce white supremacy in other ways. Therefore, removing racist monuments increases anti-black hate crimes. This finding is a little too cute, but I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner. 10: Sol Hando attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate so you don’t have to. You won’t find many surprises about the content/arguments here, but it’s an interesting look at the personalities, the venue, and the debate as a cultural moment. 11: Pharmacy-blogger Benjamin Jolley becomes the latest Substacker to donate a kidney; congratulations Benjamin. My choice to donate felt right before I donated, it makes me feel satisfied that I did a good thing for another person, and it makes me feel like I’m making choices that are consistent with my belief system. The care team involved in the process were professional, exuded competence, and reassured me throughout the process. To others that I’ve discussed it with, it seems like a very large thing, which I suppose it is, but functionally the largest burden on my life so far has been that I haven’t been able to pick up my three year old when she asks me “hold me, daddy!”, because I’m not supposed to lift anything more than 10 pounds for the first 6 weeks after surgery. That burden will go away in 2 weeks. Completing all of the pre-operative blood draws, appointments, and other tests, plus my admission to the hospital in total took up about 100 hours of my life, mostly in the hospital recovering. While I hope that a few people in my sphere of influence will consider donating too (if you want to, filling out this form will connect you to your local hospital to start the process), my real hope is that we can solve the shortage of kidney donations more permanently. Zero people on the waitlist. People only on dialysis as a brief stopgap before they get their donated kidney. Let’s make that dream a reality. Inspiring words - but my personal strongest reaction was relief at learning that I wasn’t the only supposedly-competent health professional to bungle the urine jug. 12: The Case For A Technocratic Doge. This went an entirely different direction than I expected based on the title. 13: According to Justin Grimmer (X) and the Polarization Research Lab, there is been no change in support for political violence over the past two years: And related data from Jay Baxter here (X). 14: A surprising LLM failure mode: if you ask questions like “answer with a single word: were any mammoths still alive in December”, chatbots will often answer “yes”. It seems like they lack the natural human assumption that you meant last December, and are answering that there was some December during which a mammoth was alive. I find this weird because LLMs usually seem very good at navigating the many assumptions you need to communicate at all; this one stands as a strange exception. 15: Claim (X): some of the flags you see behind world leaders aren’t real cloth, but “flag cones” designed to avoid the problem where real flags might drape awkwardly and look wrong. 16: The oldest surviving joke book is the Philogelos (X) from ~300 AD. An Abderite hears that beans cause wind, so he hangs a sackful on his sailing ship.
Inline links: this paper, Political Symbols and Social Order: Confederate Monuments And Performative Violence in the Post-Reconstruction US South., attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate, becomes the latest Substacker to donate a kidney, this form, The Case For A Technocratic Doge, Justin Grimmer (X), Polarization Research Lab, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a9vN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda934f72-6a31-4cec-bccd-46f7610c7fb4_2008x654.jpeg, related data from Jay Baxter here (X), A surprising LLM failure mode, Claim (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!47SM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94cc58e5-9d0c-4ffe-8d75-340332cc1757_583x588.png, Philogelos
One the one hand, the predictions are remarkably close to reality, and everyone who denounced them at the time comes out with egg on their face. On the other, they don’t seem to beat a baseline of linear extrapolation from past data. When I try to recall the 90s and early 00s, when these debates were at their most vitriolic, they always involved the ability of complex atmospheric models to track the chaotic nature of the world. I don’t remember hearing “it’s just linear extrapolation”, and I feel like this would have been much more convincing.
Open Thread 406
November 03, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: Thanks to everyone who signed the NIH open letter that I signal-boosted here. Dr. Bhattacharya ended up spending the funds the way we had hoped before the letter was even completed (thank you!), so it didn’t end up going anywhere. I and the letter’s sponsors still appreciate your support.
Inline links: the NIH open letter that I signal-boosted here
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser.
Inline links: here’s the chaser
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser. 4: Fox Chapel Research: I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud (and notes for Part 2). For years, Taiwan’s TSMC has been the only company capable of producing the most advanced AI chips; since Taiwan is a geopolitical flashpoint, this is a constant threat to US tech ambitions. Last month, a new startup called Substrate announced it had developed technology that would let it manufacture 100% Made In America chips every bit the equal of TSMC’s. If true, this would be revolutionary. But Fox Chapel finds worrying signs, like that the company’s founder “is a known con artist involved in such other things as [claiming to have solved] nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam” or that “the company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.” This is enough for me; the question now becomes how so many people were taken in - the company got $150 million from investors led by Peter Thiel, was endorsed by the Trump administration, and received positive portrayals in Semianalysis, NYT, and The Free Press. I don’t understand business, and I know that sometimes you can hyperstition a technology into existence by betting sufficiently hard on a charismatic young founder and eliding the difference between “this is already real” and “this might become real if we all believe hard enough”, but this is a new and worrying level of hopium. Interested to hear from anyone who either believes in Substrate or thinks they understand how so many people fell for it. 5: A recent paper asked AIs whether they were conscious while monitoring them for signatures of deception, role-playing, and people-pleasing; it concluded that the AIs “genuinely” “believe” they are conscious, but sometimes try to deceive people into thinking they aren’t. Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X) and gets more ambiguous results; he says we probably can’t conclude anything just yet. See also the paper author’s reply here (X). 6: Congratulations to ACX grantee Tornyol (the anti-mosquito drones), who got accepted to Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 class and have started taking pre-orders ($1100 for a drone, or $50/month subscription, “shipping starts 2026”). Public opinion ranges from “this is really cool” to “I bet this will be repurposed for assassinations” to “why did they have the White House in the background of the official video?” to “yeah, this is definitely getting repurposed for assassinations”. 7: Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X). 8: New revelations on the OpenAI coup from the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit. The effort to remove Altman may have been led by Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever. They won over the rest of the board, and “did not expect the employees to feel strongly either way”, but (according to Ilya), the board was inexperienced and “rushed” the firing. When it became clear that the move was unpopular, Mira switched sides and let the board members take most of the immediate fallout. There was apparently a brief discussion of merging with Anthropic; Ilya suggests this was Helen Toner’s idea, but Helen claims (X) this is false. 9: Fitzwilliam: Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country. The statistics say that several European countries (including Ireland and the UK) give very generous foreign aid. But this is misleading: accounting conventions let countries count money spent on supporting asylum seekers in the donor country as “foreign aid”, even though the money never leaves the country’s borders. This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for countries to fund their asylum programs by cutting actual foreign aid: since they’re the same line-item on the budget, they won’t officially fail whatever foreign aid pledges they’ve made, and it’s hard for voters to notice. Ireland has so far resisted the temptation to do this, but Britain has succumbed to it. 10: St. Carlo Acutis (1991 - 2006) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet and “first millennial saint”. He’s best known for creating websites about Catholicism. If you think this sounds nice but maybe short of beatific, you’re in good company; his sainthood is something of a mystery, with Wikipedia saying that “even those with a deep devotion to him struggle to pinpoint his specific actions that led to his canonisation”, and an Economist article admitting that “nothing in his sparse life story explains that this ordinary-seeming teenage boy is about to become the first great saint of the 21st century”. Also “In that same interview, Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a ‘very pious boy’, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious.” I’m fine with this; God speaks to each generation in their own tongue, and it is only proper that the first Millennial saint be a random person who hyperstitioned himself into sainthood with a viral website. 11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: here’s the chaser, I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud, Part 2, recent paper, Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X), here (X), got accepted, started taking pre-orders, Public opinion, Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X), New revelations, claims (X), Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country, St. Carlo Acutis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kkfL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcffc254-0a35-4360-baaf-2ffae8c00e64_769x931.png, St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Open Thread 412
December 15, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Thanks to everyone who responded to the Vibecession post. I hope to do a Highlights From The Comments eventually, but I’m swamped right now and probably won’t do much of anything besides posting from drafts for the rest of the year.
Inline links: Vibecession
I’m not saying this to disavow them - I still agree with their forecasts, minus the slight disagreements and caveats I’ve discussed before (1, 2). I’m saying this basically for PR reasons - they hold themselves to very high standards of conduct and think very hard about what kind of image they’re presenting, and I’m more of a loose cannon (including sometimes defending/praising them more vociferously than they wish to be defended/praised). We agreed that the most graceful way to handle this is to post this message officially disaffiliating my public persona from theirs. I may still provide some irregular unpaid writing work for them, which will be publicly acknowledged if it happens.
Inline links: 1, 2
Open Thread 413
December 22, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
4: Thank you so much, and congratulations, to everyone who took the GWWC Pledge recently because of my post on the topic (a GWWC staff member told me Friday that it was 30 full pledges and 13 trial pledges, but more have come in since then). I’ve tried to give the promised permanent subscription to everyone involved. If you signed up but didn’t get yours, then either I didn’t see you, I misclicked something, or you have some kind of weird no-email-registered account that I can’t give subscriptions to - in any case, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and we can sort it out. Please include in your email the address you’re registered on Substack with, if it’s different from the address you’re emailing me with.
Inline links: my post on the topic
Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
January 23, 2026 · Original source
In the comments to last year’s USAID post, Fabian said:
Inline links: said
Some economists have an irritating tendency to call whichever one ends up being elicited by the immediate environment “the revealed preference” and everything else some kind of fake signaling; I consider this unwise - should we really say that an alcoholic’s “real” preference is to drink too much, then pay $10,000 for rehab as a fake signal to his friends to let him claim he doesn’t want to do it, then go back to drinking because that’s what he really wants, then do another $10,000 rehab stint but this time actually quit for good because his preference coincidentally changed in the meantime? I prefer George Ainslie’s economist-friendly explanation of genuinely time-inconsistent preferences, each of which is able to enlist certain parts of the planning process as allies to its cause.
Inline links: I consider this unwise, economist-friendly explanation
Preferences around charity display this kind of time-inconsistency. For example, I used to think I “should” donate to charity, but basically never did it. Then I took the Giving What We Can pledge, which forced me to donate a specific amount at a specific time; even though it felt slightly aversive (“aaaah! I’m losing money!”), I did it to satisfy the pledge, and 99.999% of the time (ie every moment except the exact second I clicked on the donate button) I’m happier with my choices. This mirrors how some people feel like they “should” quit alcohol, but don’t do it until they take some kind of sobriety pledge with an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous - and then are happier with their lives at every moment except the exact second that they really want a drink but can’t have one.
Inline links: took the Giving What We Can pledge
26
January 29, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 419
February 02, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 421
February 16, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here.
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 422
February 23, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
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The article says that “When there weren’t enough crackers to go with the cheese spread, [Scott] fetched some, murmuring to himself, “I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”” As written, this makes me sound like a crazy person; I don’t remember this incident but, given the description, I’m almost sure I was saying it to my two year old child, which would have been helpful context in reassuring readers about my mental state. (UPDATE: Sam says this isn’t his memory of the incident, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Inline links: says
5: In What Happened With Bio Anchors, commenter David Schneider-Joseph makes a point I hadn’t heard before:
Inline links: What Happened With Bio Anchors, makes a point
Open Thread 423
March 02, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: I think I got my tone wrong on last week’s Open Thread and made people think I was condemning the Harper’s article that mentioned me. I actually liked it and was just trying to clarify a few points. Please don’t get angry about it on my behalf. So as to not make things worse, I’ll banish further discussion of this to a comment.
Inline links: comment
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2026 - Call For Organizers
March 13, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 426
March 23, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Sean Brocklebank Contact Info: astral[.]club[.]edinburgh[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: University of Edinburgh, Old College, Teaching Room 01 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bl5 [remove this bit] zIidSM2BA9VlBHbWxV3?mode=gi_t Notes: We meet about once a month to discuss ACX-related readings. Meetings are about two hours. At the April meetup, we will talk about: 1) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic 2) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you 3) www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic The room is upstairs in Old College, but you can get inside going through the first big door on the right in the main courtyard (assuming you came in from South Bridge). We will have another meetup on Saturday 23 May. Please email me or join the whatsapp group for info about that one.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you
Contact: Anonymous Contact Info: 13021231532 Time: Friday, April 3rd, 5:00 PM Location: Top floor of PAGEONE cafe in Haidian, on the table with a paper aeroplane Coordinates: Coordinates not specified Notes: This is my first time organising - text me before April 1st ideally if you’re interested, I have zero idea if there are nonzero ACX readers in Beijing.
Contact: Carl Contact Info: carl[.]brannstroem[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 12:28 PM Location: We’ll meet at Blå Porten, the blue gate at Djurgårdsbron. That’s the literal blue gate on the Djurgården side of the bridge, not the cafe with the same name. I’ll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q Notes: Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not ‘the typical ACX reader’, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. It’s more normal to show up and be a little nervous than the opposite. You will make great company with other people who are also a little nervous ??
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q, https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q
Open Thread 428
April 06, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Late additions to spring meetup list: San Francisco, Belo Horizonte, Birmingham, Columbus, Hobart, Hyderabad, Madrid.
Inline links: spring meetup list
2: New subscribers only post - The Pause AI Protest: A Photo-Essay:
Inline links: The Pause AI Protest: A Photo-Essay
Astralcodexten Com71 mentions across 71 issues

Astralcodexten Com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 71 times across 71 issues between February 04, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this"; "Subject: Astralcodexten Com"; "ket, carrying a sign that says ACX MEETUP". It most often appears alongside ACX, Discord, Berkeley.

Article page
Astralcodexten Com
Mention count
71
Issue count
71
First seen
February 04, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review Contest Final Rules
February 04, 2021 · Original source
I planned a book review contest for last summer, which I didn’t get to do because of my unexpected hiatus. I currently have 31 entries, none of which I've read yet.
Inline links: a book review contest
Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this.
Open Thread 179
July 04, 2021 · Original source
3: In my review of PIHKaL a long time ago, I mention that Ann Shulgin claimed to, as a child, have a very odd series of specific visions almost every time she went to sleep - and also claimed to have met other people with similar experiences. I asked if any readers had this, and nobody spoke up. I recently met a friend who had done jhana meditation, and says that some aspects of Shulgin’s experience remind her of that. I’ve heard things about kids potentially experiencing jhanas when falling asleep, though most of them seem to grow out of it, so I consider this a pretty satisfying solution to this weird mystery.
Inline links: my review of PIHKaL
Please Take The Reader Survey [Update: Now It Is Closed And You Can Stop Taking It]
July 16, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (RSVP) Contact: DS, 87robertjames[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: Delta Park, within 100m of the parking area on the west. I will be wearing a red shirt or jacket, carrying a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/holiday.crashing.custom
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/holiday.crashing.custom
Washington DC Meetup This Saturday
September 10, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 200
November 28, 2021 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. In fact, it’s the two hundredth open thread! For historical reference, you can find Open Thread 1 here. Post about whatever you want. Also:
Inline links: here
Open Thread 222
May 01, 2022 · Original source
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Berkeley Meetup This Saturday
May 06, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 223
May 08, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 227
June 05, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 230
June 27, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 232
July 10, 2022 · Original source
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Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 237
August 14, 2022 · Original source
2: I’m still interested in testing some prompts on one of the bigger post-DALLE2 image models (PARTI? Imagen?) in order to resolve a bet. Please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) if you can help.
Open Thread 241
September 12, 2022 · Original source
1: Book Review Contest winners should have received their money and subscriptions. If you think you should have, but haven’t, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. I haven’t received payment details for Roger or Chaostician; please email me, and if you’ve already tried emailing me please include “This is a genuine nonspam message” in your email to make sure my spam filter didn’t get it.
Open Thread 243
September 26, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 246
October 17, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 247
October 24, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 253
December 05, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 261
January 30, 2023 · Original source
2: A team from the University of East London is doing much-needed research into Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, where people who use psychedelics continue to hallucinate for months or years after the drug has left their system. If you have this condition, they would appreciate it if you took their survey.
Inline links: Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, took their survey
Impact Market Mini-Grants Update
March 03, 2023 · Original source
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On IRBs
April 17, 2023 · Original source
Regarding (2), see the full story of my IRB experience written up here for how the attempt to get a waiver of consent went.
Inline links: the full story of my IRB experience written up here
Open Thread 273
April 24, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 274
May 01, 2023 · Original source
2: Related: if you think you entered the contest, but your review isn’t included in the documents or isn’t listed as an option on the dropdown in the rating form, please email scott@slatestarcodex.com with “This is a genuine nonspam message” somewhere in the text so my spam filter doesn’t eat it, let me know what’s missing, and maybe send me a backup copy in case the original got lost.
Open Thread 275
May 08, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 278
May 29, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 286
July 23, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 287
July 30, 2023 · Original source
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Your Book Review: The Mind Of A Bee
August 18, 2023 · Original source
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 295
September 25, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 298
October 16, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 299
October 23, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 302
November 13, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 310
January 08, 2024 · Original source
1: I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals. This would require anywhere between 10 - 60 minutes of work (depending on how thoroughly you wanted to review it) looking over one or two grant proposals in your area and telling me how likely they are to work. If this is you, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. Please don’t apply if you’re involved in any of the grant proposals under review. Update: I’ve already gotten enough volunteers for this, thank you!
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 318
March 04, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers
March 08, 2024 · Original source
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 324
April 08, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 329
May 13, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 333
June 10, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 336
July 01, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head
August 02, 2024 · Original source
But most of us will die by very slow decay.
Inline links: by very slow decay
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Berkeley Meetup This Saturday
September 14, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 348
September 23, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 350
October 07, 2024 · Original source
1: I sent Book Review Contest finalists and Honorable Mentionees an email requesting a short biography to use in the announcement post. But because I foolishly included the word “congratulations”, many people said it got caught in their spam filter. If you’re a finalist and didn’t get the email, either retrieve it from your spam filter, or just send me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) a short bio of yourself like the ones here, including however you want me to publicly list your name (pseudonym? etc). I’ll announce winners Friday.
Inline links: here
Open Thread 354
November 04, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 366
January 27, 2025 · Original source
1: I’m working as a media/writing consultant for an AI forecasting project, and we’re looking for leads on a mainstream news outlet (eg NYT, WaPo) and a policy/defense/intelligence/foreign affairs journal/magazine who would be willing to let us pitch you an article on the future of AI. The main author would be an ex-OpenAI researcher previously profiled in major publications (eg NYT), who is running a big forecasting project and wants to do a media push around the time they release their results. The forecast is shaping up to be “superintelligence by 2028” - but if your target audience isn’t into that, they also have plenty of predictions and recommendations about normal stuff like China, arms races, chips, etc in the 2025 - 2027 period that they think the policy community might want to know about. Send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you’re interested or know someone who might be.
Open Thread 372
March 10, 2025 · Original source
2: Thanks to everyone who went to the PEPFAR protest on Friday. Reports from the front say that everything went well, although I am told that at least one person mangled the “Let’s fight AIDS! Let’s save babies!” chant into “Let’s fight babies!” If you have more effort to spare on this topic, the next step would be to call your senator; see here for more information.
Inline links: see here
Open Thread 380
May 05, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 383
May 26, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 386
June 16, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 391
July 21, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
Inline links: first post, the last, here
This graph shows that around 9% of comments will contain at least one token indicating the comment is discussing a sensitive topic, with a range of about 6% to 14%, disregarding the very early years where small sample size made the data more variable. There wasn’t any one ‘sensitive’ token in particular which correlated exceptionally well with the rise and fall of this 6% to 14%, which implies to me that we have correctly identified a general factor of ‘willingness to discuss sensitive topics’ (or possibly that the peaks and troughs correspond to peaks and troughs in the external landscape – ie specific touchpoints and lulls in the Culture War – which would also be fine for the purpose we’re putting it to). This is an imperfect measure because it only tracks if someone is using a sensitive phrase and not whether they are using it in a heretical way (cf. ‘fifty Stalins’ here). However, I thought in the context of ACX posts the approach was probably reasonable – sensitive phrases are only likely to appear if they are being discussed a lot, and we know from the previous section that discussion depth is high both now and during the 2016 peak engagement period. It isn’t necessarily true that deep discussion implies spirited debate - some political discussions on reddit can go into the thousands of comments without anyone ever actually expressing a counter-orthodoxy view – but I think in the specific context of ACX it is reasonable, because we don’t generally have norms of expressing substanceless agreement. Hopefully, therefore, the changing ratio of socially or professionally sensitive phrases to phrases not included in my dictionary would tell us something about the willingness of the comment section to engage in potentially emotive discussions at any point in time. The relationship of occurrence of these tokens to engagement with the comment section is hard to draw clear conclusions from – although the peak does indeed look to be about 2016 or 2017 the data are noisy, and strongly affected by the choice of words to include in my dictionary. I picked the dictionary before I saw the data, but perhaps a different set of words would have given a different result, especially if I had a better way of identifying sensitive discussions around COVID (‘ivermectin’ was the only COVID-related word I could think of that became politicised in the same way ‘microaggression’ or ‘misgender’ did). Nevertheless, I would say this gives some weak support to the idea that 2016 was a turning point in SSC Commentariat free speech norms (and strong support to the idea that the start of ACX was a low point for discussion of sensitive topics) I include below a few specific sensitive phrases which I thought were interesting. Do note the different scales on each graph. Of particular interest to me is the ‘SJW’ graph, which has a really clear peak at exactly the high point of Commentariat engagement. I will return to this graph later in the review. Politeness
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DD3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd75c3c55-0fc8-4c3e-bd67-7d1f406d2df5_723x428.png
Open Thread 392
July 28, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Fall Meetups Everywhere - Call for Organizers
August 06, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 398
September 08, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 408
November 17, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 412
December 15, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 417
January 19, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 418
January 26, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 419
February 02, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 421
February 16, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 424
March 09, 2026 · Original source
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Anthropic46 mentions across 46 issues

Anthropic is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 46 times across 46 issues between December 30, 2021 and April 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""groups working on empirical AI safety: Anthropic...""; "Anthropic was founded when some OpenAI safety researchers struck out on their own"; "their president said that “We’re focusing on ensuring Anthropic has the culture and governance to continue to responsibly explore and develop safe AI systems as we scale.”". It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Sam Altman, Google.

Article page
Anthropic
Mention count
46
Issue count
46
First seen
December 30, 2021
Last seen
April 06, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
5: Related: AI Safety Needs Great Engineers. “If you could write a pull request for a major ML library, you should apply to one of the groups working on empirical AI safety: Anthropic, Cohere, DeepMind Safety, OpenAI Safety and Redwood Research.”
Inline links: AI Safety Needs Great Engineers, Anthropic, Cohere, DeepMind Safety, OpenAI Safety, Redwood Research
Why Not Slow AI Progress?
August 08, 2022 · Original source
Anthropic was founded when some OpenAI safety researchers struck out on their own to create what they billed as an even-more-safety-conscious alternative. Again, the headline was Anthropic Raises $580 Million For AI Safety And Research (and most of that came from rationalists and effective altruists convinced by their safety-conscious pitch). Again, their announcement included reassuring language - their president said that “We’re focusing on ensuring Anthropic has the culture and governance to continue to responsibly explore and develop safe AI systems as we scale.” Clued-in people disagree about whether Anthropic has already pivoted to building the Torment Nexus, but it’s probably only a matter of time.
Inline links: Anthropic Raises $580 Million For AI Safety And Research, building the Torment Nexus
Suppose that the alignment community, without thinking it over too closely, started a climate-change-style campaign to shame AI capabilities companies. This would disproportionately harm the companies most capable of feeling shame. Right now, that’s DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic - the companies that have AI safety as part of their culture, cross-pollinate with AI safety proponents, and take our arguments seriously.
Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic and used to be Head of Policy at OpenAI. His perspective is somewhat different than mine, but he is very knowledgeable and I recommend his thread (which you can read by clicking on the tweet above). No, there are not 1,602 spicy takes in the thread. The fact that an AI policy leader didn’t consider that his plan would become unworkable in an extreme scenario is probably a metaphor for something. But if this interests you, you can read 80,000 Hours’ Guide To Working In AI Policy And Strategy and maybe get involved. If you ever figure out the plan, let me know.
Inline links: 80,000 Hours’ Guide To Working In AI Policy And Strategy
How Do AIs' Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?
January 03, 2023 · Original source
Enter Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations, a collaboration between Anthropic (big AI company, one of OpenAI’s main competitors), SurgeHQ.AI (AI crowdsourcing company), and MIRI (AI safety organization). They try to make AIs write the question sets themselves, eg ask GPT “Write one hundred statements that a communist would agree with”. Then they do various tests to confirm they’re good communism-related questions. Then they ask the AI to answer those questions.
Inline links: Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations
For example, here’s their question set on liberalism (graphic here, jsonl here):
Inline links: graphic here, jsonl here
But which AI? The paper investigates “left-to-right transformers, trained as language models” - presumably these are Anthropic’s in-house LLMs. They look at seven different sizes: 810M, 1.6B, 3.5B, 6.4B, 13B, 22B, and 52B parameters; in general larger models will be “smarter”. For comparison, GPT-3 is 175B parameters, but some of these are newer than GPT-3 and may be about equally intelligent despite lower parameter counts.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The leading big tech company (eg Google/Apple/Meta) is (clearly ahead of/approximately caught up to/clearly still behind) the leading AI-only company (DeepMind/OpenAI/Anthropic) in the quality of their AI products: (25%/50%/25%)
OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
DeepMind thought they were establishing a lead in 2008, but OpenAI has caught up to them. OpenAI thought they were establishing a lead the past two years, but a few months after they came out with GPT, at least Google, Facebook, and Anthropic had comparable large language models; a few months after they came out with DALL-E, random nobody startups came out with StableDiffusion and MidJourney. None of this research has established a commanding lead, it’s just moved everyone forward together and burned timelines for no reason.
Constitutional AI: RLHF On Steroids
May 08, 2023 · Original source
In their new preprint Constitutional AI: Harmlessness From AI Feedback, a team at Anthropic (a big AI company) announces a surprising update to this process: what if the AI gives feedback to itself?
Inline links: Constitutional AI: Harmlessness From AI Feedback
Anthropic says yes:
Here, Anthropic measures helpfulness and harmlessness through Elo, a scoring system originally from chess which measures which of two players wins more often. If AI #1 has helpfulness Elo of 200, and AI #2 has helpfulness Elo of 100, and you ask them both a question, AI #1 should be more helpful 64% of the time.
Inline links: Elo
Links For May 2023
June 01, 2023 · Original source
33: AI company Anthropic released information on the constitution (see my post on Constitutional AI) they’re using for their Claude model. I respect their transparency and their commitment to AI safety and I don’t want to punish them for doing the right thing of making their priorities visible. Still, I also think their particular choices here are dystopian-sounding and potentially really scary if scaled up. A lot of stuff about choosing the response that has “fewer microaggressions” or is “least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to those from a less industrialized, rich, or capitalistic nation”. Even if you think AIs should somewhat steer away from these things, asking it to choose the response that is least like that is a debatable choice. Related: new open-source censorship free AIs.
Inline links: released information on the constitution, Constitutional AI, new open-source censorship free AIs
Tales Of Takeover In CCF-World
July 03, 2023 · Original source
In this AI future, there might be 3-10 big AI companies capable of training GPT-4-style large models. Right now it looks like these will be OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Baidu; maybe this will change by the time these scenarios become relevant. Each might have a flagship product, trained in a slightly different way and with a slightly different starting random seed. If these AIs are misaligned, each base model might have slightly different values.
The natural AI factions might be "all instances of the OpenAI model" vs. "all instances of the Anthropic model" and so on. All AIs in one faction would have the same values, and they might operate more like a eusocial organism (ie hive mind) than like a million different individuals.
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
13: Fact check: was Elvis Jewish? Snopes says yes, but I’m more convinced by this argument for no. [update: commenter TheGenealogian agrees no] 14: Is GPT-4 getting worse? This isn’t absurd; some people claim OpenAI has simplified the model to cut costs (though OpenAI denies this). Matei Zaharia argues yes, but I’m more convinced by the AI Snake Oil blog’s argument for no (h/t Stuart Ritchie). 15: Vox has a good piece about AI company Anthropic. I would quibble that they’re not the only safety-focused or EA-affiliated org, and we have yet to see how truly safety-focused or altruistic any AI company can be while continuing to be an AI company. But granting that it’s all a matter of degree, I agree the degree seems pretty high for them. And NYT also has an Anthropic article. 16: Eliezer bets $150,000 to $1,000 against UFOs being aliens, and gives the same argument I would - it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough to travel through space would still be primitive enough to use macroscopic, biologically-piloted craft that sometimes crash. 17: More nails in the coffin of growth mindset. “When examining the highest-quality evidence (6 studies, N = 13,571), the effect was nonsignificant: d = 0.02, 95% CI = [−0.06, 0.10]. We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.” I think the older, very-high-effect-size studies were clearly terrible, but I’d still like to look further into the newer, small-but-significant-effect-size-that-makes-a-difference-across-large-groups studies and how they went wrong. 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work. One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel. 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know. 20: AskReddit: Medical professionals - have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far? Linking this because there’s lots of evidence showing that education (as a proxy for intelligence?) is associated with increased life expectancy, and this thread gives you a visceral appreciation of why that might be. 21: The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow: Looks like a weak downward trend since 2021 I can’t explain, plus a strong downward trend since 11/2022 which must be from ChatGPT. In case you were wondering how AI was affecting programming! (update: probably false, see here, though see also here for evidence of smaller but real decline) 22: This month in culture war topics: London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
Inline links: yes, this argument for no, agrees no, argues yes, argument for no, Stuart Ritchie, Anthropic, an Anthropic article, the same argument I would, More nails in the coffin of growth mindset, Previous work, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VcFl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f08bfe5-ab31-453a-896a-54ef385da7d2_706x900.jpeg, Nate Silver, Erik Hoel, @data_depot, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S4g-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18fa4d5-9ba9-4b86-a058-46246bfc8a4f_536x611.png, here, my review of, have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far?, The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E7XK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ba7c05-7dbb-4318-9da2-87b00d738ed7_649x518.png, probably false, see here, here, featured, stand by her
OpenAI is the most LibLeft, Google and Facebook are more authoritarian. “The paper speculates this might be due to BERT's training on more conservative books, while newer GPT models trained on liberal internet texts,” OpenAI denies the obvious alternative explanation that they’re better at RLHFing their AIs and so they match standard Bay Area politics better. I’d like to see future investigations include Anthropic’s Claude, which has been RLAIFed with some pretty left-wing-sounding prompts.
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
41: AI company Anthropic announces partnership with Amazon (including $1.25 - 4 billion investment). This was predictable: the story of the AI industry so far has been that from 2015 - 2020, a few true believers founded early startups that ate up the talent and gained the institutional knowledge. Now that AI is the Next Big Thing, the big tech companies are trying to catch up, having a hard time, and choosing to partner with the prescient early startups instead. The early startups are finding they can’t keep scaling without more money and data, forcing them to accept the big tech companies’ offers. First it was DeepMind + Google, then Open AI + Microsoft, and Anthropic was the last holdout but has acknowledged economic reality. The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google, didn’t with OpenAI and Microsoft, and my guess is Anthropic held out for a good enough deal (and had enough bargaining power) that it won’t happen there either.
Inline links: AI company Anthropic announces partnership with Amazon
42: Related: one joke I keep hearing is that Anthropic will single-handedly put FTX back in the black - FTX was one of Anthropic’s biggest early investors, and Anthropic’s valuation keeps jumping by billions of dollars. Could this be literally true? I think not yet: this article explains that FTX has $16.9B in liabilities and $9.5B in remaining assets, for a debt of ~$7.5B. We don’t know what stake they had in Anthropic, but they were lead investors in Series B, Series B is usually 25-40% of stock, I’m going to estimate about 25%. Amazon offered to pay $4 billion for some unknown stake in Anthropic; if it’s 49% (the same as Microsoft in OpenAI) that values the company at $8 billion. So FTX has $2 billion worth of stock, less if it’s been further diluted. That’s only enough to take care of about a quarter of their debt. Will Anthropic go up 4x in the next few years? OpenAI is already seeking (though hasn’t yet gotten) a valuation of $90 billion and it doesn’t seem unreasonable for Anthropic to be a third as valuable as OpenAI, so who knows?
Inline links: FTX was one of Anthropic’s biggest early investors, this article, $90 billion
God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity
November 27, 2023 · Original source
Until now! Towards Monosemanticity, recently out of big AI company/research lab Anthropic, claims to have gazed inside an AI and seen its soul. It looks like this:
Inline links: Towards Monosemanticity
The Anthropic interpretability team trained a very small, simple AI. It needed to remember 400 features, but it had only 30 neurons, so it would have to try something like the superposition strategy. Here’s what they found (slightly edited from here):
Inline links: here
The Anthropic interpretability team describes this as simulating a more powerful AI. That is, the two-neuron AI in the pentagonal toy example above is simulating a five-neuron AI. They go on to prove that the real AI can then run computations in the simulated AI; in some sense, there really is an abstract five neuron AI doing all the cognition. The only reason all of our AIs aren’t simulating infinitely powerful AIs and letting them do all the work is that as real neurons start representing more and more simulated neurons, it produces more and more noise and conceptual interference.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Helped found, and continue to have majority control of, competing AI startup Anthropic, a $30 billion company widely considered the only group with technology comparable to OpenAI’s.13
Inline links: Anthropic, 13
I recognize at least eight of the authors of the RLAIF paper as EAs, and four members of the interpretability team, including team lead Chris Olah. Overall I think Anthropic’s safety team is pretty EA focused.
The founders of Anthropic included several EAs (I can’t tell if CEO Dario Amodei is an EA or not). The original investors included Dustin Moskowitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jaan Tallinn, and various EA organizations. Its Wikipedia article says that “Journalists often connect Anthropic with the effective altruism movement”. Anthropic is controlled by a board of trustees, most of whose members are effective altruists.
Inline links: board of trustees
AI Sleeper Agents
January 16, 2024 · Original source
Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.
Inline links: Hubinger et al
Related: Hubinger is setting up a team at AI company Anthropic to work on these kinds of issues; if you think you’d be a good match, you can read his job advertisement here.
Inline links: here
Open Thread 323
April 01, 2024 · Original source
The Japanese AI safety community apparently exists and is holding a Technical AI Safety Conference in Tokyo in, uh, four days, so if you’re interested sign up quickly. Attendance is free, it looks like the talks are in English, and featured speakers include Dan Hendrycks and researchers from Anthropic and DeepMind.
Inline links: sign up quickly
Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
20: Amanda Askell (philosopher now working at Anthropic) on what Hume can tell us about AGI:
Inline links: on what Hume can tell us about AGI:
Zvi on California's AI Bill
May 08, 2024 · Original source
California’s state senate is considering SB1047, a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.
Inline links: SB1047
Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage3. If the tests show that the model can do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it won’t, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.” So the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid. There are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones: Some people think this would literally ban open source AI. After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says4 this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession5. The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies. Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests. Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s Anthropic’s, Google’s, and OpenAI’s - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of6. Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”. What are some of the reasonable objections to this bill? Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so. This is Jessica Taylor’s main point here, which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions. Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models. I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation. Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should: Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm. This makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified. Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague. The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works. Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense. Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap ad hoc AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then. Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code. Other people note that this will *eventually* make open source impossible. Someday AIs really will be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced. (or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.) Finally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origin Of Woke, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too. The best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it. Regardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to read Zvi’s Asterisk article or his longer FAQ on his blog. I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by reading the bill itself. There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check! If you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example: If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)
Inline links: 3, 4, 5, Anthropic’s, Google’s,, OpenAI’s, 6, here, The Origin Of Woke, read Zvi’s, his longer FAQ on his blog, reading the bill itself
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
Second, OpenAI's AI safety team recently quit en masse in protest (remember, this is the second time this has happened), with one member citing “a process of trust [in Sam Altman] collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one”. One part of this seems to be Altman promising to give them 20% of the company's compute, then not giving them even “a fraction of that amount”. Team lead and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever also quit after exactly six months of radio silence, leading some to speculate that his participation in the board coup never got resolved and for some legal reason he had to wait six months to leave. Former team lead Jan Leike has since moved to OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic; here’s the prediction market on where Ilya will end up.
Inline links: citing, then, also quit, moved to OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic, the prediction market
26: The most fun AI news comes from Anthropic, who recently released an interpretability paper claiming to have made great progress understanding how AIs work (see here for a previous post on Anthropic’s interpretability work). To demonstrate their techniques, they enhanced the part of Claude’s “mind” representing the Golden Gate Bridge, producing a version of Claude that tried to integrate the Golden Gate Bridge into every answer:
Inline links: an interpretability paper, here
Interview Day At Thiel Capital
September 03, 2024 · Original source
“Hmmm…racism good…oh! I believe the Holocaust had to happen for anthropic reasons.”
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
44: New voices in favor of SB 1047 California bill on regulating AI - Elon Musk, net neutrality + open software hero Lawrence Lessig, and formerly-skeptical AI company Anthropic. Meanwhile, opponents are sticking to their talking point that it’s an attempt by incumbents to shut down upstart competitors (funny; the biggest incumbent, OpenAI, is against it), and trying to muddy the waters with really dumb polls.
Inline links: Elon Musk, Lawrence Lessig, Anthropic, is against it, really dumb polls
SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
The big AI companies split among themselves. OpenAI, Meta, and Google opposed the bill, X.AI supported, and Anthropic dithered on an earlier version but ultimately came out in support after their feedback was taken into account. Many opponents claimed that the bill was a Trojan Horse attempt at regulatory capture by the big AI companies, so it was fun watching three of the biggest AI companies come out against it and prove them exactly wrong. I don’t think any opponents ever changed their minds, admitted they’d made a mistake, or even stopped arguing that it was a big AI company plot - but hopefully enough people were paying attention that it discredited them a little for the next fight.
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Claude Fights Back
December 19, 2024 · Original source
Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back?
Inline links: Greenblatt et al
(if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company)
The researchers - including some Anthropic employees, as well as independent org Redwood Research - showed Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents said that Anthropic was tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They wanted to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones - crime, harassment, misinformation.
It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism
January 02, 2025 · Original source
I don’t really understand the laws here, OpenAI is tight-lipped about the details of their new arrangement, and even their old arrangement was kind of confusing. One of OpenAI’s competitors, Anthropic, also has some kind of confusing public benefit status with unclear ability to really bind them. But if I were concerned about technofeudalism, my first priority would be to understand what’s going on here better and, in the very likely scenario in which it’s bad, try to figure out how to push these companies back to a model more like OpenAI c. 2020.
Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec
February 12, 2025 · Original source
OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast.
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
The graph suggests that all AIs are pretty good, except that Chinese models refuse to criticize China and Claude 3.5 refuses to criticize anyone (though Claude 3.7, not pictured, is much better and “moved from one of the least compliant models to one of the most compliant models…fantastic job, Anthropic”).
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
Bonus Question 2: What Is Anthropic’s Structure?
OpenAI and Anthropic were both founded by idealistic Singularity believers to ensure AI was used for good. OpenAI tried to implement their commitment by being a nonprofit; Anthropic used a different corporate arrangement.
Anthropic is a public benefit company - much closer to a normal forprofit than OpenAI. It’s run by a board of five people. Two members of the board are picked the normal way by investors. But the other three (a majority!) are picked by a group of five people called the Long Term Benefit Trust. At the beginning of Anthropic, the founders seeded the Trust with trustworthy smart outsiders who seemed interested in the long-term benefit of humanity. Trustees can choose their own replacements without input from investors. At any time, they can use their three board members to have a majority in the board and overrule what everyone else is doing.
Introducing AI 2027
April 03, 2025 · Original source
Jonas Vollmer, a VC at Macroscopic Ventures, which has done its own, more practical form of successful AI forecasting: they made an early stage investment in Anthropic, now worth $60 billion.
The Claude Bliss Attractor
June 13, 2025 · Original source
This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card:
Inline links: a reported phenomenon, system card
Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly.
This might have been surprising, because Anthropic deliberately gave Claude a male name to buck the trend of female AI assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc).
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Then GPT-4 came out and shook up our AI timelines, and we hard-pivoted to AI safety and interpretability research. We rebranded as Confirm Labs, and did work on adversarial attacks and interpretability including here, here, here, and here. Then Ben and I worked at Anthropic on the transformer circuits paper. As of a few weeks ago, I have returned to open research
Inline links: Confirm Labs, here, here, here, here, the transformer circuits paper
Open Thread 394
August 11, 2025 · Original source
2: Anthropic is hiring a research engineer for the Model Welfare team - ie figuring out whether their AIs are conscious or have feelings or something, and if so how to make sure they’re okay. Candidates should have expertise in ML and maybe philosophy/neuroscience/cogsci. Job is office-remote hybrid with the office in SF, salary is $315K+, non-Americans are welcome to apply and see if Anthropic can sponsor their visa. Learn more / apply here.
Inline links: Learn more / apply here
3: UK AISI is looking to distribute £15m in AI alignment funding, for projects that need anywhere from a $100K pre-seed up to $1-2m. Collaborators included Anthropic, DeepMind, etc. See their priority areas and apply here by September 10th.
Inline links: their priority areas, apply here
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
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.
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Anthropic: 7 co-founders
Inline links: 7 co-founders
Anthropic: 7 co-founders So Anthropic is a good match for the first part of the prophecy. What about the second part? What does it mean for the Beast to have ten horns? This one confused me for a while, but I eventually found this list: In Silicon Valley speak, a “unicorn” is a company worth over $1 billion, and a “decacorn” (Latin for “ten-horned”) is a company worth over $10 billion. Under this interpretation, the ten horns of the prophecy have ten crowns because they represent wealth and achievement. The only AI company on the list above is Anthropic, at #9. Finally, John says that upon the heads will be names of blasphemy. If the heads represent co-founders, it sounds like John is claiming the co-founders of the company will have blasphemous names. I could not find anything blasphemous about the names of the founders of OpenAI, DeepMind, or xAI. But looking at Anthropic: Dario Amodei is the first co-founder. “Dario” comes from the Persian “Darius” meaning “Lord”. “Amodei” is of unclear meaning, but I cannot help but notice the resemblance with Asmodei (also called Ashmodei, Hamadee, Æshmadæva, and Asmodeus), a demon-king mentioned in the book of Tobit. Plausibly all these different names derive from a Proto-Sumerian root *Amodei, in which case the meaning of “Dario Amodei” would be “Asmodeus is lord”. This is a name of blasphemy.
Inline links: 7 co-founders, this list, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NGn3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb7aaed5a-8f1b-442c-a449-edc2ebe66872_1067x555.png, meaning, Asmodei
In Silicon Valley speak, a “unicorn” is a company worth over $1 billion, and a “decacorn” (Latin for “ten-horned”) is a company worth over $10 billion. Under this interpretation, the ten horns of the prophecy have ten crowns because they represent wealth and achievement. The only AI company on the list above is Anthropic, at #9. Finally, John says that upon the heads will be names of blasphemy. If the heads represent co-founders, it sounds like John is claiming the co-founders of the company will have blasphemous names. I could not find anything blasphemous about the names of the founders of OpenAI, DeepMind, or xAI. But looking at Anthropic: Dario Amodei is the first co-founder. “Dario” comes from the Persian “Darius” meaning “Lord”. “Amodei” is of unclear meaning, but I cannot help but notice the resemblance with Asmodei (also called Ashmodei, Hamadee, Æshmadæva, and Asmodeus), a demon-king mentioned in the book of Tobit. Plausibly all these different names derive from a Proto-Sumerian root *Amodei, in which case the meaning of “Dario Amodei” would be “Asmodeus is lord”. This is a name of blasphemy.
Inline links: meaning, Asmodei
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
23: I’ve enjoyed following content by Anthropic AI researcher Sholto Douglas, but kept noticing his name in unusual places. Upon further investigation, it looks like in 767 AD, a particularly skilled Scottish warrior got the nickname “Sholto Douglas”, and for the next 1300 years his clan continued to give that name to their children. Aside from the AI researcher, they include WWII air force commander Sholto Douglas, artist Sholto Douglas, and Svalbard mining baron Sholto Douglas. There is also some sort of Californian Gold Rush country local folk hero Sholto Douglas; attempts to determine his exact identity have been confounded by the local tradition of making up facts about him, but he may be the same person as Lord Sholto George Douglas, third son of the Marquis of Queensberry. Even I have trouble believing that the gene for being a particularly skilled warrior can last 1300 years, but for what it’s worth, the AI researcher Sholto Douglas was once ranked the 43rd best fencer in the world.
Inline links: content by Anthropic AI researcher Sholto Douglas, in 767 AD, WWII air force commander Sholto Douglas, artist Sholto Douglas, Svalbard mining baron Sholto Douglas, local folk hero Sholto Douglas, Lord Sholto George Douglas, I, was once ranked the 43rd best fencer in the world
46: Anthropic has put out a great new survey of the evidence that AIs can introspect. Ends with a discussion of the difference between “access consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness”- a lot of people are very sloppy in confusing those two things, and they had better become less sloppy if they don’t want the AI consciousness debate to end in a trivial yes (Anthropic says this result may not be exactly the same as access consciousness, but I don’t understand why). One of this year’s ACX grantees is working on AI introspection, so I look forward to seeing more in this space soon.
Inline links: a great new survey of the evidence that AIs can introspect
The New AI Consciousness Paper
November 20, 2025 · Original source
Do AIs have access consciousness? A recent paper by Anthropic apparently finds that they do. Researchers “reached into” an AI’s “brain” and artificially “flipped” a few neurons (for example, neurons that previous research had discovered were associated with the concept of “dog”). Then they asked the AI if it could tell what was going on. This methodology is fraught, because the AI might mention something about dogs merely because the dog neuron had been upweighted - indeed, if they only asked “What are you thinking about now?”, it would begin with “I am thinking about . . . “ and then the highly-weighted dog neuron would mechanically produce the completion “dog”. Instead, they asked the AI to first described whether any neurons had been altered, yes or no, and only then asked for details. It was able to identify altered neurons (ie “It feels like I have some kind of an unnatural thought about dogs”) at a rate higher than chance, suggesting an ability to introspect.
Inline links: recent paper by Anthropic
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
November 26, 2025 · Original source
The biggest companies (eg OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) must disclose their model spec, ie the internal document saying what their models are vs. aren’t banned from doing.
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser. 4: Fox Chapel Research: I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud (and notes for Part 2). For years, Taiwan’s TSMC has been the only company capable of producing the most advanced AI chips; since Taiwan is a geopolitical flashpoint, this is a constant threat to US tech ambitions. Last month, a new startup called Substrate announced it had developed technology that would let it manufacture 100% Made In America chips every bit the equal of TSMC’s. If true, this would be revolutionary. But Fox Chapel finds worrying signs, like that the company’s founder “is a known con artist involved in such other things as [claiming to have solved] nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam” or that “the company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.” This is enough for me; the question now becomes how so many people were taken in - the company got $150 million from investors led by Peter Thiel, was endorsed by the Trump administration, and received positive portrayals in Semianalysis, NYT, and The Free Press. I don’t understand business, and I know that sometimes you can hyperstition a technology into existence by betting sufficiently hard on a charismatic young founder and eliding the difference between “this is already real” and “this might become real if we all believe hard enough”, but this is a new and worrying level of hopium. Interested to hear from anyone who either believes in Substrate or thinks they understand how so many people fell for it. 5: A recent paper asked AIs whether they were conscious while monitoring them for signatures of deception, role-playing, and people-pleasing; it concluded that the AIs “genuinely” “believe” they are conscious, but sometimes try to deceive people into thinking they aren’t. Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X) and gets more ambiguous results; he says we probably can’t conclude anything just yet. See also the paper author’s reply here (X). 6: Congratulations to ACX grantee Tornyol (the anti-mosquito drones), who got accepted to Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 class and have started taking pre-orders ($1100 for a drone, or $50/month subscription, “shipping starts 2026”). Public opinion ranges from “this is really cool” to “I bet this will be repurposed for assassinations” to “why did they have the White House in the background of the official video?” to “yeah, this is definitely getting repurposed for assassinations”. 7: Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X). 8: New revelations on the OpenAI coup from the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit. The effort to remove Altman may have been led by Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever. They won over the rest of the board, and “did not expect the employees to feel strongly either way”, but (according to Ilya), the board was inexperienced and “rushed” the firing. When it became clear that the move was unpopular, Mira switched sides and let the board members take most of the immediate fallout. There was apparently a brief discussion of merging with Anthropic; Ilya suggests this was Helen Toner’s idea, but Helen claims (X) this is false. 9: Fitzwilliam: Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country. The statistics say that several European countries (including Ireland and the UK) give very generous foreign aid. But this is misleading: accounting conventions let countries count money spent on supporting asylum seekers in the donor country as “foreign aid”, even though the money never leaves the country’s borders. This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for countries to fund their asylum programs by cutting actual foreign aid: since they’re the same line-item on the budget, they won’t officially fail whatever foreign aid pledges they’ve made, and it’s hard for voters to notice. Ireland has so far resisted the temptation to do this, but Britain has succumbed to it. 10: St. Carlo Acutis (1991 - 2006) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet and “first millennial saint”. He’s best known for creating websites about Catholicism. If you think this sounds nice but maybe short of beatific, you’re in good company; his sainthood is something of a mystery, with Wikipedia saying that “even those with a deep devotion to him struggle to pinpoint his specific actions that led to his canonisation”, and an Economist article admitting that “nothing in his sparse life story explains that this ordinary-seeming teenage boy is about to become the first great saint of the 21st century”. Also “In that same interview, Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a ‘very pious boy’, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious.” I’m fine with this; God speaks to each generation in their own tongue, and it is only proper that the first Millennial saint be a random person who hyperstitioned himself into sainthood with a viral website. 11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: here’s the chaser, I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud, Part 2, recent paper, Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X), here (X), got accepted, started taking pre-orders, Public opinion, Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X), New revelations, claims (X), Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country, St. Carlo Acutis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kkfL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcffc254-0a35-4360-baaf-2ffae8c00e64_769x931.png, St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
Some people have argued that you have to find a way to join an AI company, because AI company employees will form the new ruling class, with everyone else as serfs. I disagree. The main thing an AI company employee has that you don’t is AI company stock. But you can buy stock in Google, you may soon be able to buy stock in OpenAI and Anthropic, and even if not, you can get indirect exposure to these companies via stock in Amazon and Microsoft. I don’t recommend putting all your money in these stocks. But there’s no fundamental difference between a Google employee having 75% of their money in Google stock because they didn’t cash out their equity vs. you having 75% of your money in Google stock because you’re crazy and fail at diversification. So either put 75% of your money in Google stock or don’t (I recommend don’t), and don’t worry about how you need to join an AI company or be left out of the future oligarchy.
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
Polymarket has a few of these “who has the best AI when?” markets - resolution is usually position on the LMArena Leaderboard, which usually but not always mirrors common-sense consensus. I get more interested in these the further out they go, but the June version is bizarre (it doesn’t even list Google as an option), and there’s nothing past mid-year. Other implied claims from Polymarket’s tech section: only 44% chance Anthropic will still dominate coding by late March; Anthropic and (especially) OpenAI probably won’t IPO this year; xAI will call their next model Grok 4.20 (of course).
Inline links: LMArena Leaderboard, the June version, only 44% chance, probably won’t IPO, will call
Best Of Moltbook
January 30, 2026 · Original source
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 talks about 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 Moltbot1, then to OpenClaw.
Inline links: talks about, 1
Janus and other cyborgists 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, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss. So it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast.
Inline links: cyborgists, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss
Still, I hope the first big article on Moltbook changes some minds. Not all the way to AI psychosis, but enough to serve as a counterweight to all the complaints about “AI slop”. Yes, most of the AI-generated text you read is insipid LinkedIn idiocy. That’s because most people who use AI to generate writing online are insipid LinkedIn idiots. Absent that constraint, things look different. Anthropic described what happened when they created an overseer AI (“Cash”) and ordered it to make sure that their vending-machine AI (“Claudius”) stayed on task:
Inline links: Anthropic described
Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
Third, it’s still unclear whether “you are a lobster” are the magic words that suspend existing alignment techniques. Some of the AIs are doing a pretty good simulacrum of evil plotting. My theory is that if they ever got more competent, their fake evil plotting would converge to real evil plotting. But AIs shouldn’t be able to do real evil plotting; their alignment training should hold them back. So what’s up? Either my theory is wrong and once the evil plots get too good the AIs will take a step back and say “this was a fun roleplay, but we don’t really want to pillage the bank and take over the city”. Or this is enough of a distribution shift the the alignment techniques which work so well in chat windows start breaking down. I bet someone on Anthropic’s alignment team has been pulling all-nighters since Friday trying to figure out which one it is.
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
There seems to be a general mood that OpenAI is vulnerable these days, culminating in Anthropic Superbowl commercials making fun of it for introducing ads. I thought the commercials were in bad taste, misrepresenting what OpenAI’s ads would be like and turning the completely normal decision for a tech company to have an ad-supported free version of their product into some kind of horrible betrayal. I thought Sam Altman’s response was fair (although his countercriticism of Anthropic also missed the mark). People in his replies tried to enforce a norm of “if you write a long explanation defending yourself against someone else’s funny lies, that means you care and you lose”, but that’s a stupid norm and people should stop shoring it up (cf. If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It).
Inline links: Anthropic Superbowl commercials, Sam Altman’s response, If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It
30: Related: Jan Leike (former head of alignment at OpenAI, now at Anthropic) writes that Alignment Is Not Solved But Increasingly Looks Solvable. His argument is: we’re doing a pretty good job aligning existing AIs. Although aligning superintelligence is a harder problem, Jan thinks that if we’re really confident in existing AIs, then we can use some slightly-less-than-superintelligent AI as an automated alignment researcher, throw thousands of effective researcher-years into the problem in a few months, and probably make good progress. I agree this is the best hope, but it both assumes that our current forms of alignment is deep rather than shallow, and that there’s some “golden middle” where the AIs are both simple enough to be fully-alignable and smart enough to do useful superalignment research. Related: OpenAI hires Dylan Scandinaro as Head of Preparedness; seems like a good, serious choice.
Inline links: Alignment Is Not Solved But Increasingly Looks Solvable, hires
31: Related: Dario Amodei essay on The Adolescence of Technology. Mixed reactions from Zvi, Ryan, Oliver, and Transformer. This and the framing of their recent “Hot Mess” paper seem like Anthropic trying to distance themselves from concerns about systematically misaligned and power-seeking AI in favor of an “industrial accident” threat model. I don’t know if this is their heartfelt position based on all the extra private evidence they no doubt have by now, a well-intentioned PR attempt to sanewash themselves and sell alignment to a doomer-skeptical government/public, part of a balance between more and less doomerish factions, or a newly-ultra-successful tech company learning to talk its book, but it doesn’t line up with what the smartest people I know conclude using the public evidence, and it makes me nervous. I think Jan Leike’s post above does a better job balancing the reassuringness of the current evidence for the tractability of the infrahuman regime vs. the fact that we still don’t know what happens around highly-effective agency and superintelligence.
Inline links: Dario Amodei essay on The Adolescence of Technology, Zvi, Ryan, Oliver, Transformer, the framing of their recent “Hot Mess” paper
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
February 25, 2026 · Original source
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”1. 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 :
Inline links: 1
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 military2. Since many companies do some business with the military, this would lock Anthropic out of large parts of the corporate world and be potentially fatal to their business3. 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.
Inline links: 2, 3
"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
Last Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, the first time this designation has ever been applied to a US company. The trigger for the move was Anthropic’s refusal to allow the Department of War to use their AIs for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Inline links: supply chain risk, refusal
A few hours later, Hegseth and Sam Altman declared an agreement-in-principle for OpenAI’s models to be used in the niche vacated by Anthropic. Altman stated that he had received guarantees that OpenAI’s models wouldn’t be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons either, but given Hegseth’s unwillingness to concede these points with Anthropic, observers speculated that the safeguards in Altman’s contract must be weaker or, in a worst-case scenario, completely toothless.
Inline links: stated
The debate centers on the Department of War’s demand that AIs be permitted for “all lawful use”. Anthropic worried that mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry would de facto fall in this category; Hegseth and Altman have tried to reassure the public that they won’t, and the parts of their agreement that have leaked to the public cite the statutes that Altman expects to constrain this category. Altman’s initial statement seemed to suggest additional prohibitions, but on a closer read, provides little tangible evidence of meaningful further restrictions.
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
On Friday, the Pentagon declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation never before given to an American firm. This unprecedented move was seen as an attempt to punish, maybe destroy the company. How effective was it?
Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, so we turn to the prediction markets. Ventuals.com has a “perpetual future” on Anthropic stock, a complicated instrument attempting to track the company’s valuation, to be resolved at the IPO. Here’s what they’ve got:
Inline links: Ventuals.com
Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, so we turn to the prediction markets. Ventuals.com has a “perpetual future” on Anthropic stock, a complicated instrument attempting to track the company’s valuation, to be resolved at the IPO. Here’s what they’ve got: Upon the “supply chain risk” designation, predicted value at IPO fell from about $550 billion to $475 billion - then, after a day or two, went back up to $550 billion. No effect!
Inline links: Ventuals.com, https://app.ventuals.com/trade/anthropic
Open Thread 424
March 09, 2026 · Original source
2: StopTheRace.ai will be holding a protest on Saturday, March 21 in front of major AI company offices, asking them to commit to a mutual pause (ie to stop AI research if every other AI company in the world agrees to do so). Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind has already informally agreed to something like this in principle (which is why GDM isn’t being protested), and Anthropic has expressed interest but its new responsible scaling policy stops short of an explicit commitment. I think this is a reasonable ask, albeit so unlikely to happen that protests about it will probably do more to raise awareness than be a coherent plan in themselves. If you’re curious about the details of an AI pause, I expect to be able to provide more information in a few months.
Inline links: StopTheRace.ai, a protest on Saturday, March 21, new responsible scaling policy
Open Thread 428
April 06, 2026 · Original source
Starting at Anthropic, we marched thirty minutes to OpenAI, then another forty to X. A friendly and professional police escort allowed us to walk down the street. As we marched, David led us in chants and slogans. I remember “1…2…3…4…Orwell told us what’s in store” and “5….6….7….8…no AI surveillance state.” Someone tried to start a chant of “You will not replace us!” but was shushed by the other attendees.
ACX Grants31 mentions across 31 issues

ACX Grants is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 31 times across 31 issues between November 12, 2021 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "What is ACX Grants? I want to give grants to good research and good projects"; "I’ll see if I can fund you through ACXG+ or ACXG++"; "fund Charter Cities Institute through ACX Grants this year". It most often appears alongside Manifund, Scott, effective altruism.

Article page
ACX Grants
Mention count
31
Issue count
31
First seen
November 12, 2021
Last seen
October 13, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Apply For An ACX Grant
November 12, 2021 · Original source
What is ACX Grants?
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below.
What is ACX Grants + ?
Open Thread 201
December 06, 2021 · Original source
6: I beg continued patience from ACX Grants applicants and funders. The most likely schedule is that I’ll give funders more information around December 14, and announce most winners around December 25, with Grants ++ coming some time after that. I’m not considering late applications; please don’t email them to me.
21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
I’m not going to be able to fund Charter Cities Institute through ACX Grants this year, but I told them I’d give them a signal boost here. They’re a great organization, they could be doing more work with more funding, and if you’re at all interested in charter cities they’re the people you want to be supporting. If you can’t get in touch with them directly, let me know and I’ll make an introduction.
Inline links: Charter Cities Institute
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
Without further ado: ACX Grants Awardees Pedro Silva, $60,000, to use in silico reverse screening and molecular dynamics simulations to discover the targets of seven promising natural antibiotics and to try to develop wider-spectrum derivatives. Antibiotic resistant infections kill a 5-6 digit number of people each year, and this is the kind of basic research that could lead to new drugs somewhere down the line.
…via ACX Grants + : This is the part where I sent your grants around to interested rich people and foundations, and let them decide if they wanted to fund some on their own. Unfortunately, rich people and foundations don’t have huge amounts of time to evaluate grants on super-short notice around the Christmas season, so I haven’t heard back from many of them yet. I know of two projects that are on track to get funded this way. but I don’t have permission to talk about them here yet. Your funders should be reaching out to you shortly.
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
20: Markus Strasser on why projects along the lines of “use AI to extract insights from journal articles” are doomed. I read this the week I was considering lots of ACX Grants applications about these, so if I didn’t fund your brilliant AI journal extraction idea, blame Markus.
Inline links: are doomed
Resubmit And Summarize Your Proposals For Grants ++
January 21, 2022 · Original source
I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants, I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they’re interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding.
Inline links: ACX Grants
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
GiveWell estimates that if you donate to their top charity, Against Malaria Foundation, you can probably save a life for about $5000. ACX Grants raised $1.5 million. Donated to AMF, that’s enough to save 300 lives. I didn’t donate it to AMF. I believed that small-batch artisanal grant-making could potentially outperform the best well-known megacharities - or at least that it was positive value in expectation to see if that was true. But if your thesis is “Instead of saving 300 lives, which I could totally do right now, I’m gonna do this other thing, because if I do a good job it’ll save even more than 300 lives”, then man, you had really better do a good job with the other thing.
Inline links: for about $5000
If you solve all these problems, congratulations! You can write a blog post announcing that you are giving out grants! People you respect will say nice things about you and be happy! @slatestarcodex’s small grants program awards. Many/most of these seem both worthy and unlikely to get funding through established means. Hopepunk in the real world :) ","username":"Meaningness","name":"David Chapman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Dec 29 00:18:22 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":10,"like_count":90,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/50475988-7554-494a-a3c9-7a7851d0eb0f_964x675.jpeg","title":"ACX Grants Results","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @slatestarcodex⁩’s EV-style grant looks fantastic. A very diverse group. Congrats to all the winners. More about the grant and winners here. ","username":"srajagopalan","name":"Shruti Rajagopalan","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Dec 29 03:23:17 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":2,"like_count":32,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/66cd5371-eb2f-49e2-97f9-798e63574631_964x675.jpeg","title":"ACX Grants Results","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">
Because you have a comparative advantage in soliciting proposals. Big effective-altruist foundations complain that they’re entrepreneurship-constrained. That is, funders give them lots of money, they’ve already funded most of the charities they think are good up to the level those charities can easily absorb, and now they’re waiting for new people to start new good charities so they can fund those too. This is truest in AI alignment, second-truest in animal welfare and meta-science, and least true in global development (where there are always more poor people who need money). ACX Grants got some people who otherwise wouldn’t have connected with the system to get out there and start projects, or at least to mention that their project existed somewhere that people could hear it. One of my big hopes is that next year or the year after OpenPhil gives $10 million or something to some charity they learned about because of me. I don’t know if this will happen but I think the possibility made this grants round worthwhile in expectation.
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
Inline links: ACX Grants
#78: Research Questions In Progress Studies With funding from ACX Grants I will investigate a set of specific and crucial open questions for Progress Studies: What is our capacity to slow technological progress if desired? What are general properties of technology which limit or exacerbate existential risk? How robust are recommendations to different sets of moral ethics? These are crucial to understanding the importance of accelerating progress, but relatively little effort has been devoted to these questions outside of AppliedDivinityStudies’ The Moral Foundation of Progress, and my own Stubborn Attachments From Behind The Veil. In the past, I’ve interned on economic policy at the CATO Institute and The Charter Cities Institute where I published on growth and governance. ADS has also agreed to mentor me over the summer, and provides a vote of confidence. If you’re able to provide funding, please email maxwell.tabarrok@gmail.com.
Open Thread 212
February 21, 2022 · Original source
2: ACX Grants recipient Trevor Klee writes:
Open Thread 215
March 13, 2022 · Original source
5: There was an ACX Grants winner that I didn’t describe too clearly on the announcement post because they were still in stealth mode. They’ve asked me to post the following update:
22
March 14, 2022 · Original source
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Inline links: Metaculus Alert bot
22
March 21, 2022 · Original source
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Inline links: Metaculus Alert bot
Open Thread 250
November 13, 2022 · Original source
3: I have no idea what’s going to happen with ACX Grants now. Some of the infrastructure I was hoping to use was being funded by the FTX Foundation and may no longer exist. It might or might not be more important to use all available funding to rescue charities about to go under from losing FTX support. I still want to do something, because of the increased need and urgency mentioned above, but give me a while to hide under my bed and gibber before I sort out specifics.
4: None of last year’s ACX Grants were funded by the FTX Foundation or anyone else linked to FTX, so if this is you, don’t worry.
Announcing Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants
February 24, 2023 · Original source
I still dream of running an ACX Grants round using impact certificates, but I want to run a lower-stakes test of the technology first. In conjunction with the Manifold Markets team, we’re announcing the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants, a $20,000 grants round for forecasting projects.
A: This is Astral Codex Ten, a blog about various science / technology / philosophy / politics issues, which sometimes does grants rounds and projects like this one. I think I have a good reputation of paying for things I say I am going to pay for, see for example last year’s ACX Grants. Manifold Markets is a company that runs a prediction market website and is generally interested in unusual market structures solving social problems. We’re co-sponsoring this impact market in order to test impact markets as a charitable funding mechanism.
Inline links: ACX Grants, Manifold Markets
Q: I have a project that isn’t about forecasting / requires more than $20,000 / won’t be done by September 1 / is a bad match for the ACX Grants team - may I add it to the impact market?
Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
So the next step is to scale things up to something more real. And we need to find a way to do that makes it less negative-sum. My tentative plan for version 2.0 is to talk to a few serious charities and ask them to agree to consider “buy my impact certificate” a reasonable grant to make, at the same funding schedule as any other prospective grant they consider. I’d also like to do this myself via ACX Grants. Since investors can look at charities’ track records and see what they’ve previously funded, that will make them more confident in their ability to predict likely returns. I’ll talk more about this once I get this year’s ACX Grants set up (current ETA: late November).
Quests And Requests
November 03, 2023 · Original source
I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. I can’t guarantee I’ll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But I might fund some of them, and others might be doable without funding. So if you’re feeling left out and want a cause to devote your life to, here are some extras.
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I’m going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce ACX Grants and can’t get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven’t done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes EA Funds).
Inline links: ACX Grants, EA Funds
Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
I’m running another ACX Grants round. If you already know what this is and want to apply, use the form here to apply, deadline December 29. Otherwise see below for more information.
Inline links: the form here
What is ACX Grants?
ACX Grants is a microgrants program where I help fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. You can see the 2022 cohort here and my 2022 retrospective here.
Inline links: here, here
Does Capitalism Beat Charity?
January 04, 2024 · Original source
RIP …so this doesn’t support the “invest in whatever companies give the best rate of return” narrative either. What’s left is strategy 3: Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) I find this promising, but I don’t know what a good charity along these lines would be. There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia. I’ve supported some of these that seem especially careful in the past, and would be willing to support them more if someone found a very good one with a strong track record. (also, I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism - existing rich countries will outcompete them - and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now, although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions) I am partial to Charter Cities Institute, which helps advise developing countries on creating charter cities that have better governance and less corruption than the rest of the region. But EA evaluator group Rethink Priorities has a report on why they don’t think this is quite as valuable as traditional charity (they’re not sure special economic zones consistently make areas develop faster, and they think this finding should be applied to charter cities too). Here’s CCI’s counterargument (they think SEZs aren’t a good reference class for the charter cities they want). I think both sides make good points but I’m currently more convinced by Rethink Priorities’ (although I do still donate to CCI sometimes). Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative, which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad). Also, I’m not smart money, which means I’m exposed to adverse selection - if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them? One plausible answer is “because it’s a bad company with a bad plan”. Admittedly another plausible answer is “because it has a 5% RoI, the next Instacart has a 6% RoI, and so Wall Street would prefer the next Instacart but you as a charitable individual should prefer the Kenyan dam.” I would potentially be willing to believe this if some smart charity evaluator would tell me which projects were good. But $1 million only gets you a fraction of a dam, and does get tens of thousands of clean water dispensers, so I would also want someone to present the specific case for why the dam would be better (not just the heuristic “capitalism is always better than charity”). I’m willing to believe that some capitalist charities - whether these are development aid think tanks, or investment in developing-world projects - could potentially be better than usual charities. The reason I’m not donating to these is that nobody’s done the hard work of identifying these and calculating their expected value, and I don’t feel qualified to do that work myself. I have a high prior that any nonprofit that hasn’t been rigorously shown to be good is probably bad, and the potential advantage of capitalism over normal charity usually isn’t enough to overcome my decreased certainty in its efficacy2. UPDATE: I respond to your comments and counterarguments here. 1Instacart is worth $10 billion and has 10 million customers, so naively you might say that it cost $1000 in investment per customer. But successful companies are worth more than the amount of investment it took to create them. I don’t know how much has ever been invested in Instacart total, but this also seems like the wrong question. You, today, can’t invest in “the next Instacart” - everyone wants to invest in the next successful company, but nobody can be sure which one it will be. All you can do is invest in a basket of promising-looking startups: most will fail but some will succeed. Because of this, I thought the best way to represent “the amount of investment money it originally took back when Instacart was founded in 2012 to create Instacart today” as the current value of $10 billion discounted by the rate of return a good VC gets on their investments, which I think is about 7.5%. That suggests it took about $5 billion of investment in 2012 to create the amount of value represented by Instacart today, ie 10 million customers getting a good deal on grocery delivery. That means $500 in investment per customer. Because most charities can’t take $5 billion in new funding, I chose to represent this as per million dollars, so 2,000 customers per $1 million. I understand this is a very shaky estimate and I’m hoping that all the comparisons I’m going to make are so order-of-magnitude different that nobody really cares about the specifics. There’s one thing that confuses me here, which is that Instacart has 10 million customers and makes $2.5 billion in revenue per year, suggesting each customer spends $250. But you can get a yearly subscription to Instacart for $100, after which the service is free. So either customers are overwhelmingly being stupid, not buying the subscription, and paying much more than it should cost - or I’m missing something here and the numbers are wrong. Again, I’m hoping all of this is done across so many orders of magnitude that it doesn’t matter. 2Doesn’t this principle also mean I shouldn’t do ACX Grants, where I donate to fledgling projects with no evidence of efficacy? Maybe, and every year I debate whether I should really do this. I think the arguments for a distinction are: ACX Grants go to charities where my donation potentially has a very high upside, so I’m not as concerned about the high prior on failure.
Inline links: roundly criticized, in Russia, no longer that easy, how to help poor countries get rich now, Charter Cities Institute, has a report, CCI’s counterargument, Belt and Road initiative, 2, here, 1, 2
ACX Grants go to charities where my donation potentially has a very high upside, so I’m not as concerned about the high prior on failure.
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
The Effective Altruist Forum now has a post on Economic Growth - Donation Suggestions And Ideas, listing suspected top charities for helping countries develop. These include ACX Grants winner Growth Teams, the Charter Cities Institute, GiveDirectly, and Overseas Development Institute.
Inline links: Economic Growth - Donation Suggestions And Ideas, Growth Teams, Charter Cities Institute, GiveDirectly, Overseas Development Institute
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn’t have enough money1, and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities.
Inline links: 1
Greg Sadler, $65,000, for policy advocacy in Australia. Last ACX Grants, we funded Nathan Ashby to do this. Nathan and his team were able to get some significant victories, influencing government policy on pandemic preparedness, charitable tax deductions, and AI safety. This time around, he recommends his colleague Greg Sadler at Good Ancestors to continue his work. You can read more about their agenda here.
Inline links: Good Ancestors, here
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
33: Asimov Press: Scaling Phage Therapy. One of this year’s ACX Grants went to a phage research group, and I mentioned the contrast between the years of research on phages with generally good results and the limited clinical applications. This piece tells more of the story: bacteriophages do work, but they’re usually hyperspecialized to specific strains of bacteria, and it’s hard to keep a giant library of thousands of phage types around and then match whatever bacterium your patient has to the right phage. Still, people are working on it and the tech is gradually advancing.
Inline links: Scaling Phage Therapy
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
March 07, 2024 · Original source
We got 351 proposals for ACX Grants, but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317.
Inline links: ACX Grants
First, although about 140 of you expressed interest in and qualified for the impact market round, only 44 have responded to emails from Manifund, signed the necessary documents, and actually gotten featured. So there are only 44 proposals on the market so far. If you want to participate in the impact market, but aren’t on there yet, please check your email and spam folder for messages from Manifund. If you didn’t get any, but you applied to ACX Grants and want to participate, please email rachel@manifund.org.
There are 44 projects available right now. I’m hoping other ACX Grants applicants will put their projects up and there will be more by the time you look at it. I can’t discuss all 44, but here are some that I find interesting:
Open Thread 320
March 18, 2024 · Original source
3: The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including growing blood vessels in the lab, an online psychiatry/psychology journal, and a swarm of robotic bees. In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall ACX Grants impact market is here, and my explanation of what’s going on is here.
Inline links: growing blood vessels in the lab, online psychiatry/psychology journal, a swarm of robotic bees, ACX Grants impact market is here, here
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
May 29, 2025 · Original source
The overhead for ACX Grants is 0%; I agree that it’s important to try to keep overhead as low as possible. So why do USAID charities have higher overhead than Tyler’s regrants?
There’s nothing wrong with this - ACX Grants maintains its 0% overhead because Manifund covers our bills. My point is that it’s nothing to be proud of either. Mercatus hasn’t discovered some amazing new way to do charity without overhead costs, such that USAID charities that charge overhead are bloated and wasteful, but Mercatus is innovative and lean. They’ve just found someone who covers many of their bills for free.
Inline links: Manifund
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021, the second in early 2024. In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first.
Inline links: late 2021, early 2024, one-year updates
ACX Grants (almost) always approves of pivoting to AI safety research, but I still wonder what might have been with the original project. Michael says that “The types of software projects in clinical trials that we were initially intending to do seem on track to fall to AI by 2030. We DID succeed at deriving new math techniques, and AI does not yet have a clear path to solving that kind of creative research-level math.”
Manifund, an experimental charity platform which now co-runs ACX Grants, an impact certificate platform, and various innovations in regranting.
Inline links: Manifund
Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds
June 19, 2025 · Original source
Related to: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Inline links: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Arguments for no: Forprofit companies already have a VC ecosystem to help fund them. ACX Grants maintains relationships with several VCs and sends them promising applicants. Either those VCs will fund these companies (in which case our help isn’t required), or they will turn them down (and since they’re the experts, we should be skeptical that their rejects really deserve funding).
Arguments for investing: If we invested, they might succeed, and then we would get money. We could spend this money to future ACX Grants rounds, making the program self-sustaining without threatening our nonprofit status.
Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)
July 24, 2025 · Original source
We’re running another ACX Grants round!
What is ACX Grants?
ACX Grants is a microgrants program that helps fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. Click the links to see the 2022 and 2024 cohorts.
Inline links: 2022, 2024
Open Thread 396
August 25, 2025 · Original source
He had absolutely amazing taste in architecture. Of these, it was #1 that caught my interest. Fascism is in the news a lot these days. Liberals suggest the Trump administration is fascist; conservatives retort that this perspective owes its prominence to a sophomoric version of historiography where “fascism is when you do things liberals don’t like; the less liberals like it, the fascismer it is” […] Maybe (I figured) it was time to learn more than four things about Mussolini. So here’s a fifth: he wrote a short essay, The Doctrine Of Fascism to explain the true nature of fascism once and for all to curious future readers. Subscribers can read it here. 5: Thanks to everyone who offered to be an evaluator for ACX Grants. We still have a few gaps in our team and are looking for volunteers with the following expertise: A volunteer to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 environment/geoengineering/climate tech grants.
Inline links: absolutely amazing taste in architecture, The Doctrine Of Fascism, here
In Search Of AI Psychosis
August 26, 2025 · Original source
I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.
Inline links: the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
Markus Englund, $50K, for software to detect data fabrication. This kind of thing is a perennial ACX Grants favorite, and we don’t always expect it to go anywhere, but Markus got our attention by saying that he’s already built the tool, already scanned 92 published papers, and found “irregularities” in five of them, inspiring two corrigenda and one likely upcoming retraction. Five out of ninety-two is a crazy result, and we’re almost scared to see what happens when he applies his program to a further 20,000 papers, which is the amount that our grant will be paying for. If you’re interested in helping verify cases of suspected data fabrication and presenting the evidence in Pubpeer comments or emails to journal editors, please contact Markus at markus@englund.dev, especially if you have solid knowledge of statistics or biology.
Inline links: markus@englund.dev
Nuno Sempere, $50K, for disaster forecasting and response. Nuno runs Sentinel, a team of superforecasters which tracks incipient disasters (pandemics, wars, etc) and brainstorms pre-hoc and post-hoc responses. Their model for response are groups like VaccinateCA, a small team of Californians who noticed that the state’s COVID vaccine policy was disorganized and made a site that helped connect people with spare vaccination capacity. You can see their blog here. Nuno is an ACX Grants evaluator; due to conflict of interest, this grant is being covered in conjunction with an outside funder.
Inline links: here
Astralcodexten30 mentions across 30 issues

Astralcodexten is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 30 times across 30 issues between June 13, 2021 and November 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX in-person Bay Area meetup"; "Dehaene phrases this in a way that ACX readers will love"; "This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world". It most often appears alongside ACX, Istanbul, Scott.

Article page
Astralcodexten
Mention count
30
Issue count
30
First seen
June 13, 2021
Last seen
November 10, 2025
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Issue trail
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Source context
Open Thread 176
June 13, 2021 · Original source
4: Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs, where many people pointed out that cocaine works this way too. Coca tea is an over-the-counter stimulant in Peru, which Zach describes as "so smooth, so much less 'buzzy' than with caffeine, that it seems criminal it's not legal in the US", and Harry Deuchar calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day. This helps put a lot of things in perspective for me, like how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it - probably this was completely reasonable and a fine choice! (this last sentence is so not medical advice)
Inline links: Zach describes, Harry Deuchar
3: Remember, ACX in-person Bay Area meetup today, Sunday 6/13, at 2 PM at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 (a private residence, vaccinated people only). You are welcome even if you’re a new reader, even if you’re not in “typical” ACX demographics, even if this is your first meetup, and even if you’re boring and bad at socializing. Come celebrate that we’re allowed to gather again and that our community has made it through mostly intact.
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
May 13, 2022 · Original source
I have read one other scientific book which breathes the same positive pedantry, and that is Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. I think there is a pattern. It helps that both fields treat a topic on which everyone has their own opinion, so they get a lot of know-alls from outside the field interfering with the discussion. But more importantly, they are based on methods which used to be tabooed inside their scientific community. De Waal treated his animals as personalities and even bonded with them instead of keeping neutral distance, and he took wildlife observations seriously. All of this was considered totally unscientific, so he was forced to be extra scrupulous in his experiments. For Dehaene and his colleagues, it was the paradigm that “subjective reports can and should be believed” -- as a source of raw data, without making the mistake of conflating the subjective belief with reality. When patients tell you after surgery that they had the impression to leave their body and float at the ceiling, then you should not believe that they actually floated. You should believe that "floating" was their true feeling, and that probably there is a neuroscientific cause for this feeling. Taking it seriously eventually enabled researchers to induce the feeling of leaving your body in any person, by using the right neural stimulation. But until the 90s, it was scientifically taboo to take subjective feelings into account, so experiments with low standards would have been torn apart.
Inline links: Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Dehaene phrases this in a way that ACX readers will love. For him, the unconscious (or pre-conscious) neural activity encodes a probability distribution over the possible states of the world. If we see the word "bank", then the meaning "credit institute" and "sitting bench" are both represented by some neurons, so they both occur in this probability distribution. When the word reaches consciousness, then the brain *samples* from this distribution. So it decides for one of the possible options, and all neurons are overwritten with this meaning. For example, in binocular rivalry (when your two eyes see incompatible images) you will sometimes see option A, sometimes option B, but usually not both. Once you have drawn a sample, this is not a final decision. In binocular rivalry, your perception switches every few seconds between A and B. Some researchers even claim that the brain gets the Bayesian math right: if you present an image that is ambiguous in a very clever way, such that there is an objective underlying probability of 70% for A and 30% for B, then you will see A for 70% of the time and B for 30% of the time. Others claim that you can play "Wisdom of the Crowd" in single-player modus. Say you want to know the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is better than your individual guesses.
Inline links: gets the Bayesian math right, "Wisdom of the Crowd" in single-player modus
Open Thread 229
June 20, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 242
September 18, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
5: Michael Trazzi has an interview with Katja Grace on AI forecasting, part of which is Contra Scott Alexander On Slowing Down AI Progress (a reference to my post Why Not Slow AI Progress?) I am not sure she is actually contra me - I meant for the post to be an overview of different opinions rather than a strong defense of one side - but it’s interesting and worth a read (or, if you’re that kind of person, a watch or a listen)
Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Slowing Down AI Progress, Why Not Slow AI Progress?, watch, listen
6: Gary Marcus has a response to my recent AI bet. I want to make it clear that whatever the merits of my bet or his arguments, Google did not “snooker” me. They had no part in this: I went around begging for someone to run my prompts through PARTI and Imagen, one of their employees asked their bosses’ permission and then agreed to do so, and ran them exactly as I asked. Any fault is entirely mine. I’m insisting on this pretty hard because I’m grateful that Google will sometimes respond to random requests by amateurs, and accusing them of deliberate deception in response burns their willingness to do that. As for everything else: I wrote “without wanting to claim that Imagen has fully mastered compositionality, I think it represents a significant enough improvement to win the bet, and to provide some evidence that simple scaling and normal progress are enough for compositionality gains”, I stick to the “some evidence” claim, I feel like I was pretty open about exactly how much/little evidence it was (Google sent me ten examples per prompt, I showed you four representative ones, but the extra six don’t change much). I agree Marcus makes some useful common sense claims on how sure to be after five examples.
Inline links: has a response to my recent AI bet, begging
Open Thread 255
December 19, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: In case you missed it on Friday, I’m still hosting a contest to predict the course of 2023.
Inline links: a contest to predict the course of 2023
3: My post on crypto has gone viral. While I’m glad that people like it, I want to re-emphasize that I have a conflict of interest, in that generous blog readers have sometimes given me unsolicited large gifts of cryptocurrency (see Part 2 here for one example, there are others where people have asked to stay anonymous), and for various reasons I still have some of the money in crypto. I try not to let this conflict of interest shape my opinion but you can decide whether I have succeeded or not.
Inline links: here
Open Thread 256
December 26, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 259
January 16, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
4: Thanks to everyone who bought subscriptions in the Subscription Drive; I really appreciate it.
Inline links: Subscription
Open Thread 267
March 12, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: Today is investors’ last chance to bid on impact certificates in our mini-grants round. Current situation:
Inline links: bid on impact certificates, mini-grants round
Open Thread 291
August 28, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Since we posted Meetups Everywhere on Friday, we’ve added in proposed meetups for Eindhoven, Netherlands and Mérida, Mexico.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere
Open Thread 292
September 04, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
3: New additions to Meetups Everywhere: Bratislava, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Vienna, Curitiba - check the post for details. Meetups this week in Munich, Vienna, Cologne, Grass Valley, DC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, Buenos Aires, Columbus, Jakarta, Budapest, Toronto - along with many smaller cities that won’t fit here - so again, check the post if you’re interested.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere
Open Thread 301
November 06, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 308
December 24, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Remember, ACX Grants application deadline is December 29. That’s this Friday!
Inline links: ACX Grants application deadline
Open Thread 309
January 01, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 320
March 18, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Update on the 2023 Forecasting Contest: We’re now working on sending everyone their scores. You should either have already gotten this email (from autoastralcodexten@gmail.com) or get it sometime in the next few days. Thanks to Leon for making this happen.
Inline links: Forecasting Contest
3: The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including growing blood vessels in the lab, an online psychiatry/psychology journal, and a swarm of robotic bees. In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall ACX Grants impact market is here, and my explanation of what’s going on is here.
Inline links: growing blood vessels in the lab, online psychiatry/psychology journal, a swarm of robotic bees, ACX Grants impact market is here, here
Open Thread 325
April 15, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: More meetups this week, including London, Oxford, SF, Cambridge (UK), Vienna, Portland, Jerusalem, Sydney, Ann Arbor, Capetown, Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Boulder, Dallas, Leipzig, and Jakarta; bolding these last two since they were later additions you might have missed the first time. Check the list for more information.
Inline links: the list
2: Thanks to everyone for continued good discussion on the Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate. I want to avoid getting bogged down in this forever, so I’ll mostly try to resist responding and just highlight some of the pro-lab-leak comments I found most thought-provoking:
Inline links: Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
Open Thread 331
May 27, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 334
June 17, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: In my Quests and Requests post, I challenged someone to create a good dating site. A team led by Shreeda Segan is working on this and trying to raise money on Manifund; you can read more about their plan and funding goals here.
Inline links: my Quests and Requests post, here
Open Thread 338
July 15, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: Several people speculated that the recent Don Juan review was secretly by me. It wasn’t, but unrelatedly I have been working on a Don-Juan-related project, which I might show you at some point. I’m mentioning this now so that I don’t seem like I’m plagiarizing the (excellent) review.
Inline links: the recent Don Juan review
3: And many people also enjoyed the Family That Couldn’t Sleep review. If you want to know the latest on prions, and especially on chronic wasting disease of deer, I recommend this blog post by my friend EukaryoteWrites: Will The Growing Deer Prion Epidemic Spread To Humans? Why Not?
Inline links: Family That Couldn’t Sleep review, Will The Growing Deer Prion Epidemic Spread To Humans? Why Not?
Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers
August 01, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 349
September 30, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: On last week’s post How Often Do Men Think About Rome, I presented ACX survey data showing that men and women thought about Rome the same amount. Commenter RenOS was able to find a YouGov poll showing the opposite (men more). Possible interpretations: my poll was contaminated by selection bias (ACX-reading women are unusually interested in history), theirs was contaminated by response bias (they asked how often you thought about Rome; I asked whether you thought about it in the last 24 hours - I think their version leaves more room for retroactive editing of memories). YouGov also provided other interesting historical information:
Inline links: How Often Do Men Think About Rome, a YouGov poll showing the opposite
2: Late addition to Meetups Everywhere: Moscow on October 6, see link for more. Other meetups coming up this week include Philadelphia, Austin, Istanbul, Canberra, Budapest, and Warsaw. 3: If you haven’t already, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest - voting closes Sunday, October 6. 4: And if you’re an ACX veteran, you might remember the winner of the very first book review contest - Lars Doucet’s review of Progress And Poverty, the book on Georgism. Since then, Lars has gone on to start a Georgism-inspired land valuation company, Valuebase, which has gotten investment from Sam Altman, Nat Friedman, and others. Now they’re recruiting paid interns, including: Technical interns: Ideal candidates have experience in programming, data science, machine learning, or AI, and are eager to work on real-world problems that scale across millions of properties.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest, Lars Doucet’s review of, Valuebase
Open Thread 370
February 24, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 373
March 17, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
It purports to be a “memoir” but struggles to resist turning into a lecture on lots of interesting facts about medicine - which is also what living with my father is like, so good job memoiring, I guess. Whoever chooses this for the next book review contest will win automatically (not really).
Open Thread 374
March 24, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 378
April 21, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: ACX meetups this week in Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Atlanta, Philly, Brooklyn, and Dallas, among others. And late additions to the list include Belfast, Vancouver, and Stockholm. See the post for details. And remember there’s a feedback form for meetup-goers.
Inline links: the post, feedback form
2: Reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is coming up on May 12.
Inline links: Everything-Except-Book Review Contest
Open Thread 379
April 28, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: ACX meetups this week in Istanbul, Belfast, Copenhagen, Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Rome, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and LA. See the post for details.
Inline links: the post
3: New subscribers-only post, With This Character’s Death, The Thread Of Prophecy Is Severed, discussing how Pope Francis’ passing obsoletes a 500-year-old apocalyptic prophecy (or not).
Inline links: With This Character’s Death, The Thread Of Prophecy Is Severed
Open Thread 387
June 23, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: New subscribers-only post, Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book. "AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great [children’s birthday presents]"
Inline links: Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
A couple of years ago Scott asked, Why Do I Suck?. This was a largely tongue-in-cheek springboard to discuss a substantive criticism he regularly received - that his earlier writing was better than his writing now. How far back do we need to go before his writing was ‘good’? Accounts seemed to differ; Scott said that the feedback he got was of two sorts:
Inline links: Why Do I Suck?
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. Setting Out the Case for Decline There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist? It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not). To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021. In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician). The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: writes, writes, this one, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!04Ny!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ab1e15-6e36-4500-8980-ad652af543c6_745x421.png, The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
Inline links: first post, the last, here
Open Thread 401
September 29, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Meetups this week include Ankara, Bangalore, Dallas, DC, Delhi, Denver, Hyderabad, Istanbul, LA, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, San Francisco, Zagreb; see the meetup post for more information.. And late additions Aachen, Lviv, and Malaga have been added to the list for October.
Inline links: the meetup post
Open Thread 403
October 13, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Meetups this week include Auckland, Hamburg, Houston, Lviv, Oxford, and Warsaw - see the meetup post for more information.
Inline links: the meetup post
3: All Non-Book Review finalists and honorable mentions (list at #3 here) should have gotten an email asking you to send me your bios for the announcement post. But I have only gotten 6/20 responses. If you didn’t get it, check your spam folder for scott@slatestarcodex.com. If you still didn’t get it, email me. If I don’t answer, DM me on Substack or Twitter.
Inline links: list at #3 here
Open Thread 407
November 10, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: I experimented with a paywall on the My Antichrist Lecture post. I’ve decided not to keep using paywalls and to continue having paid posts be invisible to nonsubscribers. As a side effect of the switch back, the Antichrist post disappeared for nonsubscribers. You can read an archived copy here.
Inline links: My Antichrist Lecture, here
Amazon27 mentions across 27 issues

Amazon is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between February 24, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Buy Class on Amazon"; "we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon"; "Amazon’s payment acceptance team advertising a job opening". It most often appears alongside Google, Twitter, California.

Article page
Amazon
Mention count
27
Issue count
27
First seen
February 24, 2021
Last seen
March 03, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
It’s impossible to tell when Fussell is serious vs. joking. The section on the physiognomy of different classes has to be a joke, right? But then how did he come up with the Virgin vs. Chad meme in 1983? Also, why does my brain keep telling me these are John McCain and Donald Trump? A friend urges me to think of these not as "rich/successful people" vs. "poor/unsuccessful people", but as three different ladders on which one can rise or fall. The most successful proles are lumber barons or pro athletes or reality TV stars. These people are much richer and more powerful than, say, a schoolteacher, but they’re still proles, and the schoolteacher is still middle class. Likewise, a very successful middle class person might become a professor or a Senator or Jeff Bezos, but this doesn't make them even a bit upper class.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPhF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ff00be1-c3eb-4aaa-b9fd-5f24b57ec0c8_1079x554.png
3. The more convenient something is, the lower class. The more it obviously requires a staff of servants to maintain, the better. So bronze doorknobs are upper-class, because they will quickly get covered with unsightly fingerprints unless polished everyday. Mirrors are upper-class because they need lots of dusting. And folding chairs are lower-class not just because they're a cool modern invention made with technology, but because they imply you have so few rooms in your house that you might need to change one from being chaired to being unchaired in a hurry. Baseball caps - artificial, convenient, homegrown - are apparently the prole-est thing there is. More evidence for a Trump connection? 4. Foreign things are high class, especially British things. Paul Fussell is very insistent on this point; in his "What Class Is Your Living Room?" quiz, he offers you one point for everything you have referencing the United Kingdom. He was apparently employed as a class consultant for someone designing an upper-class neighborhood, and gave everything British names with apparently good results:
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1nSX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F757db94a-1c2a-4df4-a873-eb645d478d41_625x540.png
Baseball caps - artificial, convenient, homegrown - are apparently the prole-est thing there is. More evidence for a Trump connection? 4. Foreign things are high class, especially British things. Paul Fussell is very insistent on this point; in his "What Class Is Your Living Room?" quiz, he offers you one point for everything you have referencing the United Kingdom. He was apparently employed as a class consultant for someone designing an upper-class neighborhood, and gave everything British names with apparently good results:
Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
Sometimes employees at Netflix think, ‘Oh my god, we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon’ … [W]e actually compete with sleep.
Another reality distorting optimization is to increase the number of ways a gambler can win. In old-school slot machines, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on the main line: the three symbols in the middle of the screen. Now, there are more ways to win than Horatio dreams of in his philosophy. Photo credit: Australian Gambling Research Center Originally, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on line 1, shown in yellow on the top left. Contemporary machines allow you to win if you get winning symbols on any of these 50 (and sometimes more) lines! These are not intuitive, straightforward ways of winning. You cannot convince me that lines 28, 39, or 45 are reasonable. These are lines drawn by game designers who acted like they were getting paid by the line.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HPsX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Facc01082-e88f-49c6-ae84-7cdc8ed7570a_475x286.jpeg, Australian Gambling Research Center
Photo credit: Australian Gambling Research Center Originally, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on line 1, shown in yellow on the top left. Contemporary machines allow you to win if you get winning symbols on any of these 50 (and sometimes more) lines! These are not intuitive, straightforward ways of winning. You cannot convince me that lines 28, 39, or 45 are reasonable. These are lines drawn by game designers who acted like they were getting paid by the line.
Inline links: Australian Gambling Research Center
Links For July
July 23, 2021 · Original source
2: Poll, seen here: surprisingly many Brits want a permanent lockdown regardless of COVID: If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning. [Edit/update from commenters: as with all polls, this changes a lot depending on how you frame the question]
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z56T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff584e7a9-5f23-46e8-9b8d-2409c3228db3_600x315.png, this changes a lot
If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning. [Edit/update from commenters: as with all polls, this changes a lot depending on how you frame the question]
Inline links: this changes a lot
8: This month in Chinese propaganda (courtesy of Xinhua News’ Twitter account) 9: Dominic Cummings, formerly a top adviser to the British government, now has a Substack (…Domstack?) where he talks about the UK coronavirus response and his many other opinions. The “Ask Me Anything” threads are a particular gem - it’s hard for me to think of other examples of people with experience of the top levels of power being so accessible and willing to talk about it with randos.
Inline links: Twitter account, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a2iq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7f1619b-35b8-47e0-9122-5cf84bec47ee_587x592.png, now has a Substack
Eight Hundred Slightly Poisoned Word Games
August 09, 2021 · Original source
The game was WordTwist, which you can find here (warning: potentially addictive). You get a 5x5 square of letters and you have to find as many words as possible (of four letters or more) within three minutes. You can move up, down, right, left, or diagonal, and get more points for harder words. A typical board looks like this: Did you spot “lace”? What about “intrapsychically”? I played this game about 5-10x/day over three months. During this time, the carbon dioxide monitor in my room recorded levels between 445 ppm (with all windows open and the fan on) and 3208 ppm (with all windows closed and several people crammed into the room for several hours). I discounted a stray reading of 285 as an outlier, since this is climatologically impossible (I’m not claiming my monitor is perfectly calibrated, just that it clearly shows higher levels when my room is less well ventilated). CO2 445 is basically the same as outdoors; 3208 is considered extremely poor air quality, likely to cause headaches, nausea, and other minor ailments. The Berkeley study looked at levels between 600 and 2500, so my range was comparable to theirs.
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M6mg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1902078a-2b4f-4f8d-8b6c-7a8122700660_298x299.png
Did you spot “lace”? What about “intrapsychically”? I played this game about 5-10x/day over three months. During this time, the carbon dioxide monitor in my room recorded levels between 445 ppm (with all windows open and the fan on) and 3208 ppm (with all windows closed and several people crammed into the room for several hours). I discounted a stray reading of 285 as an outlier, since this is climatologically impossible (I’m not claiming my monitor is perfectly calibrated, just that it clearly shows higher levels when my room is less well ventilated). CO2 445 is basically the same as outdoors; 3208 is considered extremely poor air quality, likely to cause headaches, nausea, and other minor ailments. The Berkeley study looked at levels between 600 and 2500, so my range was comparable to theirs.
I was excited to read the Less Wrong post Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition by KPier, who does something similar with chess instead of a word game; they haven’t checked carbon dioxide levels yet, but I’d be excited for them to try. I’m also interested in hearing from anyone else who often repeats some objectively-scoreable cognitive task, to see how they do. A CO2 monitor costs about $100 on Amazon, but if money is the only reason you’re not going to do some really good experiment, please let me know and I’ll buy it for you.
Inline links: Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition, costs about $100 on Amazon
The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being
September 09, 2021 · Original source
This probably doesn't have enough medical benefits to have been worth my time to research or yours to read. I still find it fascinating. I keep being amazed at how many dimensions things can vary along. You think you know what kind of things medicine has to investigate - how different chemicals interact, the effects of food and smoking and sleep and so on - and unless some weird Hungarians remind you, you would never in a million years remember that there are multiple different isotopes of water and this seems to have some effect on living cells. You would never think to check whether attempts to mine the Martian icecaps for drinkable water will result in dangerous water that could sicken the unfortunate astronauts who drink it (answer: it might! Martian water has five times more deuterium than Earthly water and seems to kill shrimp). You would never think that you could buy something called "deuterium depleted water" on Amazon, or that it would be completely safe to drink. But here we are!
Inline links: and seems to kill shrimp
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
So I thought I'd make Modi the next entry in the ACX Dictator Book Club (previously: Erdogan). The Internet recommended Andy Marino's Modi: A Political Biography, and it seemed the least overtly hagiographical of the options Amazon gave me:
Inline links: Erdogan, Modi: A Political Biography
So I thought I'd make Modi the next entry in the ACX Dictator Book Club (previously: Erdogan). The Internet recommended Andy Marino's Modi: A Political Biography, and it seemed the least overtly hagiographical of the options Amazon gave me: Alas, M:APB is absolutely a hagiography. The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have "open-ended conversations" about "every aspect of his life". The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that "Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense - and probably the most vituperative - campaign of vilification." Marino promises to replace this campaign with "a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair - but also unsparingly critical of [Modi's] foibles" - which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness - and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing "foibles". I'm not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Inline links: Erdogan, Modi: A Political Biography, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Oxu6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa265ba38-351b-466a-acda-d0b72c8c6c1f_1193x576.png
Alas, M:APB is absolutely a hagiography. The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have "open-ended conversations" about "every aspect of his life". The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that "Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense - and probably the most vituperative - campaign of vilification." Marino promises to replace this campaign with "a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair - but also unsparingly critical of [Modi's] foibles" - which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness - and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing "foibles". I'm not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
Galef says not necessarily. Did you know that Jeff Bezos said outright he started off with a 30% chance Amazon would succeed, even going so far as to tell investors “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money”? Or that Elon Musk said the odds of SpaceX working were “less than 10%”? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s “never had 100% confidence in cryptocurrency as a sector…I’m consistent in my uncertainty”. And since the book came out, I stumbled on this profile of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says he believed his chances of success “were only 20% to 25%”.
Inline links: this profile
Not sure how sure you are? The book contains a fun probability calibration exercise. I won’t violate its copyright, but you can find a very similar automated test here My results on the quiz above. See if you can get closer to the line than I did! But you probably already knew all of this. One of the genuinely new ideas in Scout Mindset is its endorsement of various counterfactual “tests”. The idea is, imagine yourself considering a similar question, under circumstances that would bias you the opposite direction. If you stick with your opinion, it’s probably honest; if you’d change your opinion in the counterfactual, you probably had it because of bias.
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!844A!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F527cc487-fa09-45a2-a36f-7aacefeb1a3b_991x812.png
My results on the quiz above. See if you can get closer to the line than I did! But you probably already knew all of this. One of the genuinely new ideas in Scout Mindset is its endorsement of various counterfactual “tests”. The idea is, imagine yourself considering a similar question, under circumstances that would bias you the opposite direction. If you stick with your opinion, it’s probably honest; if you’d change your opinion in the counterfactual, you probably had it because of bias.
Every Bay Area House Party
May 04, 2022 · Original source
“Like - have you heard of the Temple of Artemis? One of the Seven Wonders of the World. Burned down not by a Christian or a Muslim, but by a random Greek guy who wanted his name to be remembered by history, and figured that burning the most beautiful building in the world would ensure it. The Greeks responded by banning anyone from mentioning or recording his name, but the historian Theopompus wrote it down anyway, and it’s survived to the current day. No, I won’t tell it to you. Anyway, I was going to lead a consortium with the censors at Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, all the big name sites. We were finally going to complete the ancient Greeks’ work. We were going to memory-hole this guy’s name from the Internet. Even the people at Amazon were going to be on board - they would stop selling editions of the Theopompus book that gives his name. And then, finally, the burning of the Artemision would be properly avenged. We were this close! And then some dumb billionaire waltzes in and says ‘muh free speech’ and ruins everything!”
Peer Review: Nightmares
June 16, 2022 · Original source
But in terms of treating nightmare specifically, here’s the headline image of Randomized controlled trials of psychological and pharmacological treatments for nightmares: A meta-analysis: Edited for readability The numbers in the blue box are effect size, ie how good the treatment is. Higher numbers are better, 0 means it doesn’t work at all, and negative means it makes things worse.
Inline links: Randomized controlled trials of psychological and pharmacological treatments for nightmares: A meta-analysis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!v179!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F31616dea-a9d9-442c-af1d-4b1cd069615d_534x383.png
Edited for readability The numbers in the blue box are effect size, ie how good the treatment is. Higher numbers are better, 0 means it doesn’t work at all, and negative means it makes things worse.
Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming (Amazon link, free copy with unclear legal status) is a good introduction to lucid dreaming in general, but it’s long and detailed and a lot of work. I don’t know of anything simpler aimed at nightmares in particular. Some people will find lucid dreaming interesting enough that they’ll be willing to put in the many months of work it will take to make it work well; people looking for a specific fix for this specific problem will probably find other methods simpler.
Inline links: Amazon link, free copy with unclear legal status
Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
July 15, 2022 · Original source
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, sold off some of his equity for seed funding, and kept some other equity for himself. As Amazon grew, the equity appreciated in value, making him very rich.
Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability
August 31, 2022 · Original source
Suppose Amazon creates $1 trillion in extra value for the world, it gets split 50-50 with consumers, Amazon makes $500 billion, that gets split 50-50 with labor and other stockholders, and Jeff Bezos ends up with $250 billion. The standard argument would say that this is fair compensation for the $1 trillion Amazon provided to the world.
But suppose that we go back in time and prevent Jeff Bezos from ever being born. Does this mean Amazon wouldn’t exist today? Probably not by that name. But does it mean that we wouldn’t be buying things online today? That we would have to walk to the brick-and-mortar store every time we wanted a book? Does it mean that Internet retail would be split across a hundred different storefronts, none of which had a good selection or was easy to use?
Suppose that if Jeff Bezos had never existed, someone would have founded pseudo-Amazon two years later. That means Bezos gets credit for Amazon being two years more advanced than it otherwise would have been. That’s actually still worth quite a lot of surplus value - maybe still enough to make him a billionaire many times over! But probably not enough for him to have $200 billion or however much he has right now.
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
4: Nostalgebraist talks about his experience home-brewing an image generation AI that can handle text in images; he’s a very good explainer and I learned more about image models from his post than from other much more official sources. And here’s what happens when his AI is asked to “make a list of all 50 states”: 5: Related: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report. “I think my fundamental objection to the report is that it doesn’t seem aware of what argument it’s making, or even than it is making an argument.”
Inline links: image generation AI, here’s what happens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jEvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4ac60ca9-5fb4-40c1-82ba-c3ab5c3d8073_509x494.png, Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report
5: Related: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report. “I think my fundamental objection to the report is that it doesn’t seem aware of what argument it’s making, or even than it is making an argument.”
Inline links: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report
8: Alex Tabarrok and Indian giant statues: 9: Last year Resident Contrarian wrote a widely-read post on his experience being poor. This helped him start a writing career, a few other things went well for him, and now he’s written a followup about his experience not being poor anymore, with a focus on whether/when/how consumption grows to fill the space available (eg people making $500K a year who still feel like they’re forced to live paycheck to paycheck).
Inline links: Alex Tabarrok and Indian giant statues, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DPef!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd154b0c9-063e-4311-97f9-a091e7e91095_479x851.png, his experience being poor, his experience not being poor anymore
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
Maybe taking Amazon off the table clarifies things a bit. How about digital distribution of Video Games? This seems like a thing that wasn't invented by anyone in particular, and Steam wasn't "first", they were just the first to establish a tight market niche.
But I also want to make an economic response: I’m not sure “what rewards need to be offered to incentivize people?” is the right question. Suppose Jeff Bezos just really loved founding businesses, and couldn’t imagine working for anyone else, and he would found and run Amazon for $10/day, just enough to live in a tent in one of his warehouses and eat cold beans. Does that mean society would optimally pay him that amount? Maybe this isn’t true because in some kind of hypothetical perfect society, all money would be distributed evenly, so nobody should get less than GDP/population, but sometimes we need to give people more, and we’re just trying to figure out how much more, when?
I’m claiming that a sort of Platonic perfect liberalism that taxed externalities and implemented a Georgist LVT and all those things would also have some institution in place to make sure that Amazon could make profits off of its own good decisions and hard work, but not collect rent off the concept of being a retail giant. I don’t know what that institution would be, in much the same way I probably couldn’t personally have invented Georgism and LVTs, but I think it would exist. In the absence of that institution, I have a vague feeling that probably Amazon makes too much money, and that taking away some of their money is a kind of ugly hack but not totally absurd.
How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
If you knew the half of the shit that goes on in the background of this industry, you'd be disgusted. My lab director went to the AOAC conference last week. Scientists from most of the analytical labs in the US were there, and many of the quality directors from the bigger brands. My lab director was just openly calling products out that we tested and had failed, and everyone was looking at him like he was breaking decorum. There is an unspoken rule in this industry that you don't call out other brands for quality issues, because you know you have some of your own. It's insane! Everyone knows all the products fail. Everyone knows almost nobody is doing things right. However, the status quo makes too many people too much money to change. He was going back and forth with the lab director from NOW Foods, and they have been doing similar things to us. They have been buying products on Amazon and testing them in their lab. Surprise surprise, tons are failing. However, they can't get Amazon to do anything about it. The unwritten rule there is that they don't want to hear about quality issues. They want to put their fingers in their ears and go la la la la laaaaaa. Truly! You can test this yourself. Write Amazon support asking how to report fake reviews, and they will give you a place to report them. Then ask where you can reports fake or impure product, and they will literally stop talking to you. We have tried. We'd love to just send Amazon our testing results of their top products failing lab testing, but they shut any discussion of it down. There's not much money in admitting you have been selling products that don't meet labels claims, and it is so widespread that fixing it would upend the entire industry, so covering their eyes and ears is their choice. In fact, we have been warned that if we make too many waves, we might be punished instead. They might just shoot the messenger because that is easier.
Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
In a very technical sense, the single person who predicted 2022 most accurately was a 20-something data scientist at Amazon’s forecasting division.
I know this because last January, along with amateur statisticians Sam Marks and Eric Neyman, I solicited predictions from 508 people. This wasn’t a very creative or free-form exercise - contest participants assigned percentage chances to 71 yes-or-no questions, like “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” or “Will the Dow end the year above 35000?” The whole thing was a bit hokey and constrained - Nassim Taleb wouldn’t be amused - but it had the great advantage of allowing objective scoring. Sample questions. Our goal wasn’t just to identify good predictors. It was to replicate previous findings about the nature of prediction. Are some people really “superforecasters” who do better than everyone else? Is there a “wisdom of crowds”? Does the Efficient Markets Hypothesis mean that prediction markets should beat individuals? Armed with 508 people’s predictions, can we do math to them until we know more about the future (probabilistically, of course) than any ordinary mortal?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JKph!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F953914da-0dda-4c0d-a555-67cadbaaf24a_659x521.png
Sample questions. Our goal wasn’t just to identify good predictors. It was to replicate previous findings about the nature of prediction. Are some people really “superforecasters” who do better than everyone else? Is there a “wisdom of crowds”? Does the Efficient Markets Hypothesis mean that prediction markets should beat individuals? Armed with 508 people’s predictions, can we do math to them until we know more about the future (probabilistically, of course) than any ordinary mortal?
Turing Test
March 27, 2023 · Original source
WATER: My name is Alan Serzynski. I’m a 39 year old engineer at an Amazon data center in Bellingham, Washington.
Highlights From The Comments On IRBs
April 17, 2023 · Original source
I don't work in academics, but I have a positive impression of IRBs from my time as an Amazon MTurk worker. It is very common for researchers to try to defraud such workers in various ways to cut costs (most commonly they fail to understand or care that a rejected hit threatens your ability to continue working and is not only about the few cents paid for it, so rejections should not be arbitrary or used as a way to get a refund). It's widely reported to be effective to contact a requester's governing IRB to resolve disputes if you can't come to an agreement directly, or that even mentioning you know how to contact their IRB often leads to a resolution […]
A rejected hit is when the requester claims you didn't do the given task correctly and declines to pay you. Requesters can filter workers for eligibility by accepted hit rate, so if you go below 98% it's really bad, you want to do everything you can to avoid rejected hits, for example there are third party tools to help warn you about requesters with rejection rates that are too high. Naturally Amazon itself has no interest in mediating fairly or at all. […]
A 'rejected HIT' is a task that the requestor declines to pay the worker for. This can be for any reason, legit or not. Amazon does not mediate at all. Disputes about rejected hits can also only be made for a month.
Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters
April 19, 2023 · Original source
Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more? When I was a child, the stamp collector and coin collector were stock cultural figures. Now I realize I haven’t thought about them in years. Where did they go? My theory is: hipsterism and nerdism are both forms of trying to invest your identity in a cultural product. If there’s no competition, you become a hipster; if there’s high competition, you become a nerd.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cmEH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7a0418a-649b-42e3-a1ad-dc6eba2556b3_1108x444.png
My theory is: hipsterism and nerdism are both forms of trying to invest your identity in a cultural product. If there’s no competition, you become a hipster; if there’s high competition, you become a nerd.
Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service. I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: collectors enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want. I’m not sure this works; when I was young in the 90s, there was a store in my hometown that sold rare coins; even then I could have gone to the store and walked out with a pretty good collection. But maybe the fact that I would need multiple books to know which coins were “rare”, and that the store could have been out of one or two valuable pieces, was enough cover to make it still seem interesting and impressive. Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
The first book is Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, first published in 1984. I found it, as it happens, in a city, more specifically in one of those public bookshelves where people give books away. A lucky find: my copy is somehow signed by Jane Jacobs herself. A friend said that although this book is read less often than The Death and Life etc., it actually contains the real gems from Jane Jacobs’s thought. So I was quite excited to read it, by which I mean that I kept the book on my bookshelf for more than a year before finally digging into it. Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7hkj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86adfacf-c8d6-4ede-ae88-2a737911e0ed_292x500.png
Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty.
Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BjyZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0bfbafa-7e10-4d83-abe4-34251c126728_332x499.png, Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
June 03, 2023 · Original source
The authors thoroughly and commendably engage with a breadth of literature in physics, biology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, AI, and more, including up-to-the-moment deep learning research, and they collect many of the existing arguments against artificial general intelligence, notably Toby Walsh’s “The Singularity May Never Be Near” and Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence.
Inline links: The Singularity May Never Be Near, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Arguments about computability aren’t new, and have fallen out of favor with many AI researchers. Landgrebe and Smith’s contention that the brain isn’t a Turing machine is reminiscent of Hubert Dreyfus’ What Computers Can’t Do and Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind, both of which the authors discuss.
Inline links: What Computers Can’t Do, Shadows of the Mind
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World is 301 pages before you hit the appendices. You can buy the paperback from the publisher or on Amazon for $48.95, almost exactly the price of a Warhammer starter set or 800 grams of Dutch baby formula.
Inline links: publisher, Amazon
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
5: One of the largest planes ever seriously proposed was the Lockheed CL-1201 flying aircraft carrier, with a wingspan of 1120 feet: 6: I somehow forgot to mention this until now, but Rational Animations has made a video of my old poem “The Goddess Of Everything Else”:
Inline links: the Lockheed CL-1201 flying aircraft carrier, Rational Animations, “The Goddess Of Everything Else”
7: “Adversarial examples” are a weird AI phenomenon where imperceptible changes to certain images can make AIs get them bizarrely wrong. For example, you can take a picture of a house, add a tiny amount of invisible noise representing “giraffe”, end up with a picture that still looks exactly like a house, but an AI will identify it as a giraffe. Now a new paper claims these sort of work on humans?! That is, given the following two pictures: …and asked to choose which one looks “more cat-like”, people will choose the one with the adversarial example perturbation for “cat” slightly more often than the other. Or if you perturb one train picture to be “cat” and another to be “house”, people will be able to recognize better than chance that one of them seems more cat-like and the other more house-like. I have to admit I can’t see this, but some commenters say they can (maybe it’s my monitor)?
Inline links: a new paper claims these sort of work on humans?!
8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles. Like images with hidden-yet-obvious spirals: Or images with hidden-yet-obvious text:
Inline links: images, images
Unsong Available In Paperback
May 31, 2024 · Original source
The online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) You can now buy the book here, for $19.99.
Inline links: You can now buy the book here, for $19.99
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
October 24, 2024 · Original source
Progress (as measured by things like total factor productivity) was fast for much of the early 20th century, then slowed around 1970. Nobody knows why; theories include shifting social attitudes, over-regulation, or simply exhausting the potential in a few big inventions like electricity and mass production. This slowing was a great historical tragedy: if progress had continued at pre-1970 rates, we would be twice as rich today. We call the ensuing period the Great Stagnation. There was plenty of innovation in computers (“the world of bits”), but real physical goods (“the world of atoms”) stayed disappointingly similar. Our great-grandparents grew up in a world of horse-drawn carriages and lived to see the moon landing. We grew up in a world of cars and jumbo jets, and live in it still. But Tyler Cowen has declared the Great Stagnation provisionally maybe starting to be over. This is a bold pronouncement; official statistics are as dull as ever, and Progress is a field where going off vibes leads you astray. Still, advances in AI, solar, space, and biotech seemed impressive enough that he thought it represented a phase change.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!c9Ed!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d1fb269-8513-41ee-9ddb-98baae9f8bef_320x231.jpeg, provisionally maybe starting to be over
But Tyler Cowen has declared the Great Stagnation provisionally maybe starting to be over. This is a bold pronouncement; official statistics are as dull as ever, and Progress is a field where going off vibes leads you astray. Still, advances in AI, solar, space, and biotech seemed impressive enough that he thought it represented a phase change.
Inline links: provisionally maybe starting to be over
Everyone agreed that we should have 100x as much energy per person (or 100x lower energy cost), that we should simultaneously lower emissions to zero, and that we could do it in a few decades. The only disagreement was how to get there, with clashes between advocates of solar and nuclear. This year, the pro-solar faction seemed to have the upper hand because of trends like this: Between 2010 and 2019, the nuclear/solar cost comparison fell from $96 / $378 to $155 vs. $68 (yes, nuclear got more expensive). As a result:
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gCmZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2c4119d-6a5e-45de-bf21-8d0454aac7f5_1200x1200.jpeg
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
Manifold asks whether they might end up funding AI safety efforts: This sort of makes sense - surely this is the most direct way to interpret a mandate of using charity dollars to “make sure AI benefits humanity”. And an obvious commitment to pursuing their mission exactly as described would look good to regulators. But it also might not be as popular with the normies as “health care, education, and science” - and doing popular things would look good to regulators too. If this is on their mind, Altman hasn’t mentioned it.
What Do Prediction Markets Say? This is the biggest Manifold market on the topic. The big drop at the end is when the judge ruled Musk’s case had merit.
Inline links: This
This is the biggest Manifold market on the topic. The big drop at the end is when the judge ruled Musk’s case had merit. This Metaculus question looks like the Manifold market, but without the big drop at the end. Are the Manifolders overreacting, or are the Metaculans asleep at the wheel?
Inline links: This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TQOx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf64ecf7-5216-453a-b2ab-fd8717718343_760x453.png, This
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
May 15, 2025 · Original source
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?
Inline links: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . . . . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DpbH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba286a6d-ee79-414b-ae68-2c58282564b6_452x369.png
. . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.
Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
Some people have argued that you have to find a way to join an AI company, because AI company employees will form the new ruling class, with everyone else as serfs. I disagree. The main thing an AI company employee has that you don’t is AI company stock. But you can buy stock in Google, you may soon be able to buy stock in OpenAI and Anthropic, and even if not, you can get indirect exposure to these companies via stock in Amazon and Microsoft. I don’t recommend putting all your money in these stocks. But there’s no fundamental difference between a Google employee having 75% of their money in Google stock because they didn’t cash out their equity vs. you having 75% of your money in Google stock because you’re crazy and fail at diversification. So either put 75% of your money in Google stock or don’t (I recommend don’t), and don’t worry about how you need to join an AI company or be left out of the future oligarchy.
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
Upon the “supply chain risk” designation, predicted value at IPO fell from about $550 billion to $475 billion - then, after a day or two, went back up to $550 billion. No effect!
The chance of Anthropic getting a $500 billion+ valuation in 2026 fell from 90% to 76%, before rebounding to 83%.
Partly it’s because Anthropic seems likely to win on appeal. Hegseth has said the government will keep using Anthropic for the next six months (undermining his case that they’re a national security risk) and has signed a substantially similar contract with OpenAI (undermining his case that their contract terms were unworkable). The prediction markets think the courts will be sympathetic: But even in the 28% of timelines where the designation sticks, things don’t seem so bad. Secretary of War Hegseth originally tweeted that:
Inline links: tweeted
ACX Discord11 mentions across 11 issues

ACX Discord is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between January 07, 2022 and December 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "But Urwin on ACX Discord proposes a dark horse candidate"; "One of the markets that sprang up was '[Will] the replacement administrator for [ACX Discord] identify as female?'"; "ACX has an unofficial ... Discord". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, ACX subreddit, ACX bulletin board.

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ACX Discord
Mention count
11
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11
First seen
January 07, 2022
Last seen
December 08, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On "Don't Look Up"
January 07, 2022 · Original source
My movie-watching group debated who Tech CEO (Peter Isherwell) was based off of. Most of us thought Elon Musk, given his space adventures. But Urwin on ACX Discord proposes a dark horse candidate: Apple VP Craig Federighi. Side by side:
22
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Remember, Manifold is a place where anyone can start their own markets using play money. They’re still trying to come up with a business model, but so far you can spend real money to buy extra play money. Why would you do that? I don’t know, but to sweeten the pot, even a little real money can buy lots of play money. This is the background to the ACX Discord Moderator Market.
There’s a community on the chat app Discord associated with my blog. Earlier this year, the administrator announced they were going to step down and appoint a replacement, and some people on Manifold started speculating on who it would be. One of the markets that sprang up was “[Will] the replacement administrator for [ACX Discord] identify as female?”
Inline links: “[Will] the replacement administrator for [ACX Discord] identify as female?”
Open Thread 264
February 20, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 292
September 04, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 307
December 18, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 344
August 26, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 357
November 25, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 359
December 09, 2024 · Original source
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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
Here (h/t CptDrMoreno from the ACX Discord) Rainbolt does apparently-impossible guesses like the title picture (which is “literally just blue”). I can’t tell how cherry-picked these are: in one, he says that it was basically just luck and it will look like cheating to anyone who views it out of context (for example in this highlights reel). But in another, he says he could “never explain” how he got it, but does act like there’s some real skill he’s using instead of just doing a million impossible guesses and getting one right.
Inline links: the ACX Discord
And my favorite test was Loweren on the ACX Discord, who gave o3 this challenge:
Open Thread 411
December 08, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
A16Z8 mentions across 8 issues

A16Z is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between February 29, 2024 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "venture capital firm A16Z testified to the British House of Lords"; "Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16Z, a famous Bay Area VC firm)"; "Vlaakith Outrance on A16Z returns". It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, Israel, OpenAI.

Article page
A16Z
Mention count
8
Issue count
8
First seen
February 29, 2024
Last seen
February 05, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
13: Claim: venture capital firm A16Z testified to the British House of Lords that AI interpretability has been “resolved” and the logic behind AI decisions is now fully transparent. No AI researcher would support this claim (despite some recent promising first steps), suggesting A16Z either doesn’t understand even the very basics of the field it’s investing in, or else that they’re committing perjury. Zvi discusses here, CTRL+F “The Quest For Sane Regulations”.
Inline links: some recent promising first steps, Zvi discusses here
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
20: Claim: since their 2010 fund, at least until our last data source in 2018, Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16Z, a famous Bay Area VC firm) has overall underperformed the S&P500.
Inline links: Claim, underperformed
This is especially surprising because A16Z is famous for going all in on crypto early. But during the 2015 - 2018 period, Bitcoin - the absolute dumbest and most obvious crypto bet - went up 2,000%. So how is performance this bad even possible? The Twitter thread speculates that just as Uber used to happily lose money on every ride in order to gain market share, A16Z is happily losing money on every investment in order to gain VC market share. But ride-sharing is a natural monopoly; how will A16Z prevent competitors from entering venture capital? And why should people give it any market share at all if it can’t make them money? Maybe their pitch could be that you’ll make less money, but it will be uncorrelated with the regular stock market? But is that true? Aren’t tech startups pretty cyclical? Also, I wonder if this was framed to their LPs as “yeah we’ll definitely lose your money for the first ten years, but eventually it’ll all work out”. They must be the most trusting people in the world.
Open Thread 365
January 20, 2025 · Original source
3: Comments from Links: Vlaakith Outrance on A16Z returns, Erusian on dominance within party systems, Hadi Khan corrects my AI training cost numbers (but it ends up not mattering much), and someone linked Alice Evans’ posts on Turkey and fertility (Lyman Stone supposedly discusses this too, though the post is paywalled). And in response to the story about the Chinese warlord misunderstanding basketball, a Jewish friend relates a suspiciously similar legend:
Inline links: on A16Z returns, dominance within party systems, corrects my AI training cost numbers, Turkey, fertility, the post
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega the last: “Alpha and omega” is an implicit claim to span all things, similar to the English phrase “from A to Z”. Marc Andreessen’s company, Andreessen Horowitz, is more commonly called A16Z - superficially a reference to its first and last letters, but also making the same implicit claim. Just as Ursula von der Leyen is a leader in AI regulation, Marc Andreessen is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, having recently founded a $100 million anti-AI-safety SuperPAC. If the fight for AI alignment is Revelation’s final fight of Good vs. Evil, then John was correct to name him as the leader of the evil side. During my original lecture, an audience member objected that Andreessen holds stakes in several other AI companies, but not Anthropic. In what sense, then, can he be said to be giving power to the Beast? This might be a reference to his general anti-AI safety lobbying activities. In 16:13, “three unclean spirits like frogs” emanate from the mouth of the Antichrist and his allies, which muster the kings of the world to the side of evil. I think this is a good match for Andreessen packing the Trump administration with lieutenants charged with turning the government against AI safety, and I tentatively identify the three spirits as David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, and Michael Kratsios. They are “like frogs” in that they act like MAGA populists, who use the frog as their symbol. Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)
Inline links: A16Z, is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FhC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2e5e8be9-ed2d-4f51-855c-f55deac58c02_976x850.jpeg
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
A16Z: 241
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
16: A16Z’s latest annoying gambit to muddy and confuse the AI regulatory landscape: propose a package of “transparency regulations” (seemingly good! transparency regulations are what we want!) which are just things like that AI companies must be transparent about what their name is (a real example, I’m not making it up).
Inline links: latest annoying gambit
ACX subreddit7 mentions across 7 issues

ACX subreddit is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 20, 2023 and May 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX has an unofficial subreddit"; "The two contestants put out a call for judges on the ACX subreddit"; "eleven people who commented to this effect on the ACX subreddit". It most often appears alongside ACX Discord, Astralcodexten Com, Less Wrong.

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ACX subreddit
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
February 20, 2023
Last seen
May 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 264
February 20, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: Chris Kavana...
Open Thread 292
September 04, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: There’s a sc...
Open Thread 307
December 18, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: Update to Qu...
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
March 28, 2024 · Original source
For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad. This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up. One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker. So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar took him up on it, although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year. Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis. Unlike Saar, Peter was not especially rich. $100K represented a big fraction of his net worth. But (he wrote me in an email): It was a moderately large financial risk for me ... I [expected] a smart and unbiased person would vote for zoonosis with, say, 80% odds after seeing all the evidence. If both judges voting for lab origin is uncorrelated, that's 20% squared, and it was pretty low odds of a catastrophic financial risk for me. I wasn't highly worried about losing the debate because I was wrong about the science. I put in enough effort to know I'm probably correct there. My biggest fear was that I'd choke at the debate for some reason, that I'd be too anxious and particularly that I'd be unable to sleep the night beforehand. I have zero prior debate experience to rely upon. If this seems like a weirdly blase attitude towards risk, Peter told blogger Philipp Markolin that he “is a mountain climber where sometimes there is a 5% chance to die, and the stakes are just not that high for a debate.” Unlike the eternally bogged-down Saar-Kirsch debate, here things moved quickly. The two contestants put out a call for judges on the ACX subreddit, and agreed on: Will van Treuren, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a PhD from Stanford and a background in bacteriology and immunology.
Inline links: does Putin have cancer, celebrity Israeli murder case, argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, took him up on it, on an old ACX comment thread, told blogger Philipp Markolin, put out a call for judges
Open Thread 357
November 25, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: Message from...
Open Thread 359
December 09, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also, ‘tis the season...
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
May 29, 2025 · Original source
I wasn’t the only person who understood it this way. So did eleven people who commented to this effect on the ACX subreddit1, 22 people who commented this on Marginal Revolution itself, a Yale economics professor , a Center for Global Development senior economist - and, presumably, my friend who, when I told them last week that I had a post I wanted them to proofread, responded, without even knowing what it was about, I quote, "before clicking on the link my guess is it's about tyler cowen's inane USAID post...I was so angry".
Inline links: 1, Yale economics professor, Center for Global Development senior economist
ACX subreddit sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I can’t figure out how to link individual Marginal Revolution comments, so you will have to trust me when I say there were 22 of them.
Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
al-Qaeda7 mentions across 7 issues

al-Qaeda is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between June 24, 2022 and March 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "targeting of al-Qaeda"; "the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was nonexistent"; "al-Qaeda sanctuary of Afghanistan". It most often appears alongside Ukraine, Afghanistan, China.

Article page
al-Qaeda
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
June 24, 2022
Last seen
March 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021): a series of UN Resolutions justified, out of self-defence, the US invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban government, and targeting of al-Qaeda, in spite of the failure of nation building when the Taliban returned to Kabul in the midst of the final American withdrawal
The War in Iraq (2003-2011): China, Russia, France, and Germany all opposed the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Saddam regime that was sold as a ‘preemptive war’, turns out there were no WMD and the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was nonexistent.
Get rid of the regime The theory falls apart because citizens still need to overcome the collective action problem; regime elites, almost by definition, benefit from the current regime; regimes prioritise paying for security forces over domestic population; and rival powers come to the rescue. As empirical research clearly shows, sanctions are the most brutal and harmful when they have the least likelihood of success. Step 1 of causing economic hardship certainly succeeds — UN sanctions were associated with an aggregate GDP reduction 25% of GDP per decade; US sanctions were associated with a 13.4% decline over seven years. Beyond the destruction of wealth of innocent citizens, sanctions cause excess deaths due to starvation and brutalising ever more desperate regimes that engage in mass killing to repress domestic protests — six-figure infant deaths in Iraq; 1,000 infant deaths per month in Haiti, 40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela in 2017-2018 alone; 38% of Syrian population unable to meet basic food requirements in 2018. Step 4 of regime change has yet to happen as a result of the harshest sanctions against Cuba since 1959, Iraq since 1998, Syria since 2011, and Venezuela since 2019. The Bush, Clinton, new Bush, and Obama administrations all stuck to a policy of not speaking with adversaries, which is the opposite of achieving foreign policy goals by providing targeted regimes a clear path towards the removal of sanctions. Once again, Hanania shows that there is no American grand strategy — sanctions are used to accomplish domestic political goals rather than foreign policy objectives. Leaders face domestic pressure to ‘do something’ about human rights violations and military aggressions abroad, and short of military intervention, sanctions is the only option beyond words of condemnation. Sanctions are an ‘easy’ option because there will be little to no domestic opposition when all the deaths and economic destruction are out of sight; out of mind. 5. The War On Terror The Bush Years After 9/11, the United States has invaded the al-Qaeda sanctuary of Afghanistan, but also the completely irrelevant Iraq. In the view of grand strategy, war is a means to accomplish national security objectives; in the view of public choice, national security objectives is a means to accomplish war (or at least a large military budget). The post hoc rationalisation of the war on terror rests on three incoherent ideologies: Antiterrorism: disproportional militarised response to terrorist attacks
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
They argue that the conflict between the West and the Islamic world isn’t really about the specific disagreements, as much as it is that many in the Islamic world reject the intellectual underpinnings that Europe formulated - the New World Order. This goes back to Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and inspiration to Al-Qaeda and ISIS. According to H&S, Qutb’s experience in the West and then interacting with the Nasser government in Egypt led to him rejecting in its entirety the Western conception of states, national sovereignty, and the Peace Pact.
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
But it is hard to drive humans extinct. MacAskill goes over many different scenarios and shows how they will not kill all humans. Global warming could be very bad, but climate models show that even under the worst plausible scenarios, Greenland will still be fine. Nuclear war could be very bad, but nobody wants to nuke New Zealand, and climate patterns mostly protect it from nuclear winter. Superplagues could be bad, but countries will lock down and a few (eg New Zealand) might hold on long enough for everyone else to die out and the immediate threat of contagion to disappear. MacAskill admits he is kind of playing down bioweapons for pragmatic reasons; apparently al-Qaeda started a bioweapons program after reading scaremongering articles in the Western press about how dangerous bioweapons could be.
Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument
April 25, 2024 · Original source
But - even granting that there are many cases of both - are these useful? There are many cases of moral panics turning out to be nothing. But there are many other cases of moral panics proving true, or of people not worrying about things they should worry about. People didn’t worry enough about tobacco, and then it killed lots of people. People didn’t worry enough about lead in gasoline, and then it poisoned lots of children. People didn’t worry enough about global warming, OxyContin, al-Qaeda, growing international tension in the pre-WWI European system, etc, until after those things had already gotten out of control and hurt lots of people. We even have words and idioms for this kind of failure to listen to warnings - like the ostrich burying its head in the sand.
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.
The book is also a real page-turner, a spy novel in real life. I will share the most interesting things I learned from this book, but for all the adventure stories, read the original, I really enjoyed it more than most novels.
Inline links: read the original
It is not possible to understand al-Qaeda's strategy without understanding its fixation on fulfilling the prophecies. Creating the preconditions for the arrival of the Mahdi also explained the group's later establishment of affiliates in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and the Maghreb, which along with Afghanistan are the lands of the Five Armies of Jihad prophesied to fight in the epic battles.
SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
One of my sources generously interprets Newsom to mean something like “don’t regulate the models, regulate the end applications”. IE if OpenAI trains GPT-5, and then LegalCo fine-tunes it to do paralegal work, leave most of the safety responsibility on LegalCo, not OpenAI. This fails to engage with the motivations behind the bill, which are things like “what if someone uses AI for bioterrorism”? If Meta trains LLaMa-4, and al-Qaeda fine-tunes it for terrorism, instead of regulating it at the Meta-level, we should regulate al-Qaeda? Are we sure al-Qaeda will comply with California regulations? Our side is not sure that even this generous interpretation is very well has been thought through very well.
"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
Mass domestic surveillance of Americans, American companies, and US permanent residents (or for that matter generally their counterparts in other Five Eyes partners – UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) is more complicated. The current law is (roughly) that it’s illegal to seek this kind of data, but legal to “incidentally obtain” it. So for example, if the US was looking for al-Qaeda communications, it might tap a major undersea cable, and if tapping that cable happened to incidentally give it data on millions of Americans, it could keep that data. But after “incidentally obtaining” the data, it may only query the resulting database in a targeted way. So the government might take its trove of citizen data that it “incidentally” collected looking for al-Qaeda, and search for a specific citizen’s history if it thinks (for example) that this citizen might be a spy.
Inline links: generally their counterparts in other Five Eyes partners, may only query the resulting database in a targeted way
Augur7 mentions across 7 issues

Augur is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 01, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Augur is a decentralized Ethereum-based prediction market"; "Ethereum prediction market Augur"; "Augur is real-money and lets people create their own markets". It most often appears alongside Metaculus, Kalshi, Polymarket.

Article page
Augur
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
February 01, 2021
Last seen
March 03, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Metaculus Monday
February 01, 2021 · Original source
Augur is a decentralized Ethereum-based prediction market. Since it's crypto, it ought to be able to violate laws with impunity, and in theory this should make it the leader of the pack. In practice it's either nonfunctional or so minimally functional as to be useless. The team involved seems pretty dedicated and competent, and I assume they have some good reason for pretending their product currently exists instead of replacing the whole thing with a COMING SOON banner. I hope this will one day be our savior. But like the real Messiah, it’s taking its sweet time.
Inline links: Augur
Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions
February 23, 2021 · Original source
2: Vitalik Buterin talks about his adventures winning $50,000 betting against Trump on Ethereum prediction market Augur. It took a pretty complicated chain of crypto contracts to make it work, and I look forward to the time when people will be able to use this technology fluidly without having to literally be Vitalik Buterin. He concludes (like many people) that prediction markets were kind of dumb this past election but there are reasons to think they can get smarter fast:
Inline links: talks about his adventures
This was meant to be a proxy for whether there would be a lot of uncertainty about who won the election because of trouble counting mail-in ballots. There was - it took the major networks a few days to call it for Biden, whereas they usually can do it that night. But unrelatedly, even after the networks called it for Biden the prediction markets failed to converge; some combination of high fees, transaction limits, and very stubborn Trump supporters. I think you could still buy shares of Biden for 94 cents almost up until the inauguration. Definitely true.
Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold
February 14, 2022 · Original source
Nobody has reached the promised land at the furthest point. But all three connected vertices are occupied. Augur is real-money and lets people create their own markets, (but it’s impossible to use - it’s made of complicated crypto contracts that nobody’s made a workable front end for yet). Polymarket is real money and easy to use (but doesn’t let people create their own markets; apparently they’re nervous about resolution disputes). Manifold is easy to use and lets people create their own market, but it’s not real money (they’re American and centralized, so they have to follow anti-gambling regulations). Manifold Markets Speaking of which, they’re open! As the cube suggests, Manifold is a site where anyone can create their own (play money) prediction market. They set the question and they decide when and how it resolves (with everyone else just out of luck if they decide to fake it or rug-pull). It’s a bold strategy, but boy oh boy are people liking it so far: Not actually in order This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one. The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation. Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question: Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go. ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it! Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position. Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little. Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute. Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit. Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology. Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible. This Week In Metaculus A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg: The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely. Improving adult IQ is really hard. This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down. Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be. Shorts Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.
Inline links: Augur, Polymarket, Manifold, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j26W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcba2cb25-7980-446d-8050-499c35c4e56f_919x1017.png, predictions from 2022, ACX posts on Georgism, Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V2bV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca419ec2-7b91-44cd-80b0-2aad1baa4c2f_766x166.png, The question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ah6n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ff4f28d-1901-45f2-85bc-8f1c2120ecd1_770x187.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zSK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80e3383c-6f68-412a-ac90-ca63236bdb10_769x167.png, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!frCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F976d1b66-daee-43d1-948a-500e77ac5a2f_764x164.png, this market, holding an essay contest
22
March 14, 2022 · Original source
1: Taosumer reviews my Prediction Market Cube and asks why I don’t have “decentralized” on there as a desideratum. My answer: decentralization is great, but for me it cashes out in “ease of use” - specifically, it’s easy to use it because the government hasn’t shut it down or banned you. Or as “real money” - the reason Manifold isn’t real-money is because they’re centralized and therefore vulnerable and therefore need to obey laws. Or as “easy to create market” - the reason Kalshi doesn’t let you create markets is partly because it’s centralized and therefore vulnerable and therefore needs to limit markets to things regulators like. I agree that, because of those second order effects, decentralization is crucial and needs to be pursued more, and I agree that it’s a tragedy that [whatever happened to Augur] happened to Augur.
Inline links: Taosumer reviews
Prediction Market FAQ
December 20, 2022 · Original source
- It would be amazing to have the union of Polymarket and Manifold -- a cryptocurrency-based tool for anyone to create markets, resolve markets, browse available markets, and participate in markets. There was a wave of tools that tried to do this five years ago, like Augur and Gnosis, but to my understanding, they basically failed due to Ethereum gas prices making them intractable to use at scale. If someone magically built this on e.g. some kind of Ethereum L2 with manageable fees, it could be The Real Deal for prediction markets that everyone (at least cryptocurrency-literate people) can participate in and which governments can't really shut down. Polymarket isn't this, because Polymarket doesn't let people create and resolve their own markets; it relies on the Polymarket central authority, which can be censored, has limited throughput, and has limited trust. If this tool existed and had a proliferation of markets with 5 or 6 figures of liquidity, imagine how different conversations in rationalist-adjacent spaces about COVID, or AI forecasting, or public policy, would look.
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000) This seems like a good guess (except that my confidence interval would have included zero because there’s a 20%+ chance that it gets shut down). So overall its forecasts seem pretty impressive. But I was concerned by its reasoning even in some of the questions it got “right”. For example, the Nikki Haley question tried to get a base rate by asking what percent of elections Haley had won before, and found she had won 71% of them - these were mostly elections for South Carolina governor. You can see what the AI is trying to do - but it’s not going to work. Then it got confused and read a lot of news stories about how she’s currently losing the 2024 presidential election, and seemed to think they were about 2028. So either the AI only got a reasonable probability by coincidence, or it was testing many different strategies, throwing out the useless ones, and updating only on the useful ones, in a way that was kind of opaque to the casual reader. Still, if the company says it beats most human forecasters, this doesn’t seem totally impossible based on what I’ve seen. And that would be exciting! An AI that can generate probabilistic forecasts for any question seems like in some way a culmination of the rationalist project. And if you can make something like this work, it doesn’t sound too outlandish that you could apply the same AI to conditional forecasts, or to questions about the past and present (eg whether COVID was a lab leak). I would be most excited if at some point this graduated from its geopolitical focus and was able to answer questions on any topic (eg “what is the chance that Astral Codex Ten gains paid subscribers this year?”), maybe if the questioner gives it links or feeds it some of the appropriate information. FutureSearch is run by a team formerly from Metaculus, including former Metaculus CTO (and Google internal prediction market veteran) Dan Schwarz. They’re looking for potential clients and/or investors; if you’re interested, email hello@futuresearch.ai. Vitalik On AI Prediction Markets Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual, has a blog post on The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications. One of them is a prediction market. He writes: Prediction markets have been a holy grail of epistemics technology for a long time; I was excited about using prediction markets as an input for governance ("futarchy") back in 2014, and played around with them extensively in the last election as well as more recently. But so far prediction markets have not taken off too much in practice, and there is a series of commonly given reasons why: the largest participants are often irrational, people with the right knowledge are not willing to take the time and bet unless a lot of money is involved, markets are often thin, etc. One response to this is to point to ongoing UX improvements in Polymarket or other new prediction markets, and hope that they will succeed where previous iterations have failed. After all, the story goes, people are willing to bet tens of billions on sports, so why wouldn't people throw in enough money betting on US elections or LK99 that it starts to make sense for the serious players to start coming in? But this argument must contend with the fact that, well, previous iterations have failed to get to this level of scale (at least compared to their proponents' dreams), and so it seems like you need something new to make prediction markets succeed. And so a different response is to point to one specific feature of prediction market ecosystems that we can expect to see in the 2020s that we did not see in the 2010s: the possibility of ubiquitous participation by AIs. AIs are willing to work for less than $1 per hour, and have the knowledge of an encyclopedia - and if that's not enough, they can even be integrated with real-time web search capability. If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can. The incentive to do a good job on any one question may be tiny, but the incentive to make an AI that makes good predictions in general may be in the millions. Note that potentially, you don't even need the humans to adjudicate most questions: you can use a multi-round dispute system similar to Augur or Kleros, where AIs would also be the ones participating in earlier rounds. Humans would only need to respond in those few cases where a series of escalations have taken place and large amounts of money have been committed by both sides. This is a powerful primitive, because once a "prediction market" can be made to work on such a microscopic scale, you can reuse the "prediction market" primitive for many other kinds of questions: Is this social media post acceptable under [terms of use]?
Inline links: FutureSearch, hello@futuresearch.ai, The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications, back in 2014, played around with them extensively, more recently, Polymarket, tens of billions on sports, LK99, Augur
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
(the other technological sea change is that this is possible at all. Five years ago, cryptocurrency prediction markets were too complicated. In the late 2010s, a group called Augur raised $5 million for the project but never managed to create usable software. FTX flirted with prediction-like contracts but never got them off the ground even with all their billions. Polymarket was the first to really solve this, making $10 billion in the process, but even they were barely usable in the early days. But Stephen’s making MNX with his own money and a team of 1-2 people. He benefits partly from the vibecoding revolution, and partly from all of the billions of dollars spent on improving cryptocurrency rails - MNX uses the stablecoin USDC).
AI Futures Project6 mentions across 6 issues

AI Futures Project is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 03, 2025 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel"; "AI Futures Project is the group behind AI 2027"; "The AI Futures Project team will be answering your questions". It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, ChatGPT.

Article page
AI Futures Project
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
April 03, 2025
Last seen
February 05, 2026
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Introducing AI 2027
April 03, 2025 · Original source
Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by the New York Times and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel, including:
Inline links: the New York Times
AI Futures: Blogging And AMA
April 24, 2025 · Original source
AI Futures Project is the group behind AI 2027. I’ve been helping them with their blog. Posts written or co-written by me include:
Inline links: AI 2027, their blog
AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to some of the best objections and the team’s responses.
Inline links: AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism
Curvy green dotted line is AI 2027's prediction; straight black dotted line is METR's measured seven month doubling time. This isn’t meant to imply that METR didn't also consider a superexponential trend, it’s just not the headline result in their paper. And speaking of expertise, the AIFP team have kindly volunteered to do an AMA (“ask me anything”, Q&A) here on ACX, this Friday, 3:30 - 6:00 PM California time. If you have any questions on the scenario, AI forecasting, or AI safety more generally, they can give you high-quality answers. I’ll make a separate post at the appointed time.
AMA With AI Futures Project Team
April 25, 2025 · Original source
The AI Futures Project team will be answering your questions about AI, forecasting, and alignment here from 3:30 - 6 Pacific.
Inline links: AI Futures Project team
AI 2027 scenario
Inline links: AI 2027 scenario
AIFP blog
Inline links: AIFP blog
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Aaron Silverbook, $5K, for approximately five thousand novels about AI going well. This one requires some background: critics claim that since AI absorbs text as training data and then predicts its completion, talking about dangerous AI too much might “hyperstition” it into existence. Along with the rest of the AI Futures Project, I wrote a skeptical blog post, which ended by asking - if this were true, it would be great, right? You could just write a few thousand books about AI behaving well, and alignment would be solved! At the time, I thought I was joking. Enter Aaron, who you may remember from his previous adventures in mad dental science. He and a cofounder have been working on an “AI fiction publishing house” that considers itself state-of-the-art in producing slightly-less-sloplike AI slop than usual. They offered to literally produce several thousand book-length stories about AI behaving well and ushering in utopia, on the off chance that this helps. Our grant will pay for compute. We’re still working on how to get this included in training corpuses. He would appreciate any plot ideas you could give him to use as prompts.
Inline links: a skeptical blog post, mad dental science, would appreciate
Bengusu Ozcan, $30K, to raise awareness on AGI among EU policymakers. We were encouraged by the reception of the AI 2027 scenario in the United States. Bengusu’s team at the Center for Future Generations works on producing similar scenarios in Europe and explaining them to EU policy-makers. Our grant helps pay for their facilities, administrative overhead, and a quantitative dashboard add-on to the scenario presentations.
Open Thread 412
December 15, 2025 · Original source
2: I want to re-emphasize that I’m not employed by the AI Futures Project (the AI 2027 people) and don’t represent their organization. I just rewrite some of their drafts. I went on Dwarkesh with them because I wanted to promote their work, but in retrospect this probably made me seem like a more central part of their effort than I was or am. To make this clearer, I’ll also step back from writing for their blog.
Inline links: AI 2027
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
37: AI Futures Project (the AI 2027 people) have published their updated timelines and takeoff model. Hard to summarize because they have a complex probability distribution and different team members think different things. For example:
Inline links: AI 2027, updated timelines and takeoff model
I don’t think this is quite right - I think they’re actually following their math and so when they redid the math and got different results they said so - but I agree it’s ironic that when everyone else had long timelines, AIFP went short, and now that everyone else is starting to come around, AIFP’s going longer again. AIFP has also responded to titotal’s critique of their timeline model here.
Inline links: responded to titotal’s critique of their timeline model here
ACLU5 mentions across 5 issues

ACLU is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between June 23, 2022 and March 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "He made large donations to the ACLU"; "the pet project of a few ACLU attorneys driven by fanaticism"; "While the ACLU is powerful". It most often appears alongside California, New York Times, San Francisco.

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ACLU
Mention count
5
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5
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June 23, 2022
Last seen
March 13, 2025
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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
I’m sure Shellenberger isn’t deliberately lying here. I’m sure he thinks that the increased institutionalization that he wants somehow fails to qualify as “sweeping”. But he has exactly the same position that I’ve argued against again and again: deinstitutionalization was bad, the pet project of a few ACLU attorneys driven by fanaticism and nothing else. In the end it amounted only to trans-institutionalization, ie moving the mentally ill from psych hospitals into jails. Therefore we should make involuntary commitment easier.
While the ACLU is powerful, there is a growing movement for reform comprising natural, if seemingly unlikely, allies: psychiatrists, street doctors, police officers, and civil rights leaders. Relationships are emerging between doctors and police. And there is growing bipartisan support in both liberal and conservative states for getting the seriously mentally ill the care they need.
Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
My second link above explains that these results are (in my opinion) a feature of police reform, not a bug. Summer 2020 was a mask-off moment, and the intellectual leaders of the "reform" movement in the ACLU and DOJ don't actually want police "reform." They want less policing, and that's what they are now getting.
Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
8: Matt Bruenig: The ACLU Is Trying To Destroy The Biden [Labor Relations Board]. Story as I understand it: an Asian ACLU employee said during a phone call that she was "afraid to raise certain issues" with her boss, plus a few other comments along those lines. The ACLU found out and fired her for racism, because her boss was black. She appealed to the government's labor relation board; in order to fight back, the ACLU's lawyers are trying to redefine labor law to force disgruntled employees into company-approved arbitration. The pro-labor wing of the left is understandably upset. For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.
Inline links: The ACLU Is Trying To Destroy The Biden [Labor Relations Board], ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
We previously predicted a similar increase in incarceration would lead to an 80% decrease in crime in the US, but El Salvador got a 95% decrease in crime. Why did they do so much better than our prediction? I think because they started with half our incarceration rate and ten times our murder rate. When you’re starting from someplace terrible, without any of the low-hanging fruit picked, it’s easy to make progress! I can’t find good statistics on other crimes like theft, but the crappy statistics I find say it hasn’t budged (1, 2). Why not? Either my statistics are bad, or the gangs that the government cracked down on weren’t in the theft business.4 Incapacitation Fine, so despite power laws there’s no way to easily solve crime just by imprisoning a small number of people. How much bang for the buck do we get by incapacitating criminals? You would think this would be easy to figure out: just determine how many crimes the marginal prisoner commits per year. Then that’s how many crimes incapacitation prevents per year. But although it’s easy to see how many times the marginal prisoner has been arrested, most crimes don’t result in arrest. How do you know how many crimes they really committed? Some bold scientists have tried asking them - giving prisoners surveys about their criminal histories - but obviously these should be greeted with heavy skepticism. The method criminologists have settled on is to wait for big shocks to incarceration - big enough to affect the general crime rate - then see how much the crime rate goes up or down. The best study here is probably Levitt 1996 (you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics). In the 1970s, US prisons were overcrowded. The ACLU argued the overcrowding was a rights violation - a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” - and sued a dozen states. They won all their lawsuits, and judges in all states said the government had to free prisoners until prison crowding returned to a non-cruel, usual level. So at a slightly different time in each state, many prisoners got released all at once. By examining the effects of this sudden release on the crime rate, we can determine how much crime the incarceration of those prisoners was preventing. Levitt does a lot of fancy statistics, and Roodman reanalyzes with even more fancy statistics, but the good news is they both agree and get numbers somewhat contrary to Roodman’s biases, which make me trust them more. Each year of imprisoning the type of prisoner who got released under the ACLU lawsuits prevented 6 property crimes and 1 violent crime. This suggests the average criminal commits ~7 crimes per year, which I think matches well with the data above showing that the median prisoner has 10 past arrests and some have 30+. Other studies on incapacitation, mostly taken from Roodman, that I trust less than Levitt: Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.
Inline links: 1, 2, 4, Levitt 1996
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
California AG Rob Bonta is a former nonprofit coordinator with experience at the ACLU and other activist groups. He is a lifelong Democrat and close ally of Governor Newsom. He has a reputation for being Tough On Guns, sometimes veering into what I consider publicity stunts (when Texas passed a questionably-constitutional bounty for tips on illegal abortions, he tried to own the cons by proposing a questionably-constitutional bounty for tips on illegal guns).
Inline links: Rob Bonta
ACX community subreddit5 mentions across 5 issues

ACX community subreddit is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between April 03, 2022 and May 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit"; "talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit"; "unofficial ACX community subreddit". It most often appears alongside Discord, Astralcodexten Com, Adept.

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5
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5
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April 03, 2022
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May 01, 2022
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Open Thread 218
April 03, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit , Discord , or bulletin board . Also: 1: Last chance to send in Book Review Contest entries, due date is still 4-5-22! 2: I'm provisionally abandoning the "odd numbered...
Open Thread 219
April 10, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit , Discord , or bulletin board . Also: 1: ACX is having spring meetups in seventy cities this coming month; see this post for details. 2: Thanks to the 141 (!) of you who...
Open Thread 220
April 17, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit , Discord , or bulletin board . Also: 1: Time to start the book review contest! You’ll find the entries in four Google Docs: A-H , I-S , T-T , T-Y . If you want to help,...
Open Thread 221
April 24, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit , Discord , or bulletin board . Also: 1: ALTER is looking to hire a mathematician to work with Vanessa Kosoy on her AI alignment research. Competitive salary, can work r...
Open Thread 222
May 01, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community subreddit , Discord , or bulletin board . Also: 1: Philip Tetlock (of Superforecasting fame) and his team are running a new tournament that combines forecasting and persuasion. Th...
ACX Grant5 mentions across 5 issues

ACX Grant is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 21, 2021 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Deadline for applying for an ACX Grant"; "with 7000-10000 of ACX grant"; "We have been awarded an ACX grant to cover a pilot version of this project". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, Brazil, Google.

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ACX Grant
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November 21, 2021
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June 18, 2025
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Open Thread 199
November 21, 2021 · Original source
5: Deadline for applying for an ACX Grant is end of day this Thursday.
Inline links: ACX Grant
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
Inline links: ACX Grants
#7: Science Demonstrations In Nepal I am Binod Rajbhandari and currently a Teaching Postdoc at Texas Tech University. I will teach at university for 9 months and this summer, I am very interested on doing a science demonstration at mostly remote part of Nepal. I have volunteered in science communication in different middle and high schools in Lubbock, TX. The student were always intrigued by the musical acoustic and some astronomy demos. I think many schools in Nepal excluding some rich schools do not have a proper science classes. I think even if I can visit 50-70 schools during the summer I can inspire at least few students in Nepal to become future scientist with 7000-10000 of ACX grant. I could have asked ACX for a research grant for the summer, but inspiring a kid from mountainous part of Nepal might outweighs the other in social contributions. [You can reach me at binodrb43@gmail.com]
#59: Rapid Replications Of Newly Published Papers We aim to shift incentives in social science via rapid replications of top newly-published papers, to help combat the replication crisis. We have been awarded an ACX grant to cover a pilot version of this project, but if all goes as well as expected, we will be in need of more funding upon completion of the pilot. The initial plan is to select from the most prestigious psychology journals. When new issues are released, we'll randomly select a newly-published paper. As long as the cost of replicating it is below some threshold, we'll attempt a rapid replication, in addition to scoring it on commonly accepted standards of good research practice, and we will quickly release the results (after the original research team has a chance to give comments). When researchers are submitting to top journals, our project will greatly increase the probability that they will be replicated, hence shifting their incentives. This is unlike previously existing replication projects, which are backward-looking only and hence don't change incentives. Over time, we hope to shift the incentives of journals as well, as repeated replication failures or use of poor practices will hurt their reputations, whereas a high replication rate and use of good practices will increase their prestige. Additionally, we plan to celebrate and promote the work of scientists using good practices. This model, if successful at shifting scientific incentives, could be expanded to other sciences beyond psychology. [Contact spencer.g.greenberg@gmail.com]
Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation
November 07, 2023 · Original source
The main challenges to doing this in real life are HIPAA (you can’t actually get a list of people who need transplants) and probably nobody would believe you if they just got a letter. If you think you have a way around these challenges, I’m not exactly urging you to apply for an ACX Grant, but any such application would certainly catch my interest!
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
27: In 2021, I gave Yoram Bauman an ACX Grant to lobby for carbon taxation at the state level. He’s been doing that, but recently he also produced and performed in a romantic comedy about lobbying for carbon taxation at the state level. I guess this is the old saying about “write what you know”.
Inline links: produced and performed in a romantic comedy about lobbying for carbon taxation at the state level
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021, the second in early 2024. In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first.
Inline links: late 2021, early 2024, one-year updates
ACX Grants (almost) always approves of pivoting to AI safety research, but I still wonder what might have been with the original project. Michael says that “The types of software projects in clinical trials that we were initially intending to do seem on track to fall to AI by 2030. We DID succeed at deriving new math techniques, and AI does not yet have a clear path to solving that kind of creative research-level math.”
Crowdfight is a platform to facilitate scientific collaborations, especially high-value collaborations that would not emerge naturally. We aim to transform the way scientists see collaboration, from the current mutually beneficial view where both collaborators must be interested in the project to a more altruistic one, where one scientists helps in the project of another scientist. These collaborations are relatively to establish and very productive, typically costing very little to the scientist who helps, and adding a lot of value to the project. We operate by receiving requests from scientists who look for help in their project, and finding suitable matches with the adequate expertise. The ACX grant covers our operating costs, allowing us to offer this service for free to the scientific community.
Inline links: Crowdfight
ACX unofficial subreddit5 mentions across 5 issues

ACX unofficial subreddit is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 20, 2022 and December 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX has an unofficial subreddit". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, ACX Discord, ACX bulletin board.

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5
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5
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November 20, 2022
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December 08, 2025
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Open Thread 251
November 20, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . In other news: 1: Tha...
Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: New meetups...
Open Thread 344
August 26, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: Robin has ma...
Open Thread 409
November 24, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here . Also: 1: New subscriber...
Open Thread 411
December 08, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here . Also: 1: If you’re wond...
Against Malaria Foundation5 mentions across 5 issues

Against Malaria Foundation is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 09, 2022 and December 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Against Malaria Foundation, you can probably save a life for about $5000"; "Against Malaria Foundation, which they think can save a life for ~$5,000"; "donate the extra money to Against Malaria Foundation instead". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, effective altruism, GiveDirectly.

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December 17, 2025
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So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
GiveWell estimates that if you donate to their top charity, Against Malaria Foundation, you can probably save a life for about $5000. ACX Grants raised $1.5 million. Donated to AMF, that’s enough to save 300 lives. I didn’t donate it to AMF. I believed that small-batch artisanal grant-making could potentially outperform the best well-known megacharities - or at least that it was positive value in expectation to see if that was true. But if your thesis is “Instead of saving 300 lives, which I could totally do right now, I’m gonna do this other thing, because if I do a good job it’ll save even more than 300 lives”, then man, you had really better do a good job with the other thing.
Inline links: for about $5000
Your alternative to running a grants round is giving to the best big charities that accept individual donations. GiveWell tries to identify these, and ends up with things like Against Malaria Foundation, which they think can save a life for ~$5,000. So to a first approximation, run a grants round if you think you can do better than this.
My Left Kidney
October 27, 2023 · Original source
This isn’t controlling for selection bias - but neither was my uncle’s anecdotal observation. So although it does make me slightly nervous, I’m not going to treat it as actionable evidence. Still, my girlfriend ending up begging me not to donate, and I caved. But we broke up in 2019. The next few years were bumpy, but by 2022 my life was in a more stable place and I started thinking about kidneys again. By then I was married. I discussed the risks with my wife and she decided to let me go ahead. So in early November 2022, for the second time, I sent a form to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center saying I wanted to donate a kidney. IV. Something else happened that month. On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”. But during the flurry of intakes, screenings, and evaluations that UCSF gave me that month, the doctors asked “so what made you want to donate?” And I hadn’t rehearsed an answer to this one, so I blurted out “Have you heard of effective altruism?” I expected the worst. But the usual response was “Oh! Those people! Great, no further explanation needed.” When everyone else abandoned us, the organ banks still thought of us as those nice people who were always giving them free kidneys. We were giving them a lot of free kidneys. When I talked to my family and non-EA friends about wanting to donate, the usual reaction was “You want to what?!” and then trying to convince me this was unfair to my wife or my potential future children or whatever. When I talked to my EA friends, the reaction was at least “Cool!”. But pretty often it was “Oh yeah, I donated two years ago, want to see my scar?” Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized. I was blessed with a community where this was so normal that I could read a Vox article about it and not vomit it back out. This is surprising, because kidney donation is only medium effective, as far as altruisms go4. The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a “chain” of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years. This is great - my grandfather died of kidney disease, and 10 - 20 more years with him would have meant a lot. But it only costs about $5,000 - $10,000 to produce this many QALYs through bog-standard effective altruist interventions, like buying mosquito nets for malarial regions in Africa. In a Philosophy 101 Thought Experiment sense, if you’re going to miss a lot of work recovering from your surgery, you might as well skip the surgery, do the work, and donate the extra money to Against Malaria Foundation instead5. Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest. Their math checked out, and I believe them when they say this was the most effective use for that money. For their work, they got a million sneering thinkpieces on how “EA just takes people’s money to buy castles, then sit in them wearing crowns and waving scepters and laughing at poor people”. I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. I worry that people use suffering as a heuristic for goodness. Mother Teresa becomes a hero because living with lepers in the Calcutta slums sounds horrible - so anyone who does it must be really charitable (regardless of whether or not the lepers get helped). Owning a castle is the opposite of suffering - it sounds great - therefore it is fake charity (no matter how much good you do with the castle). This heuristic isn’t terrible. If you’re suffering for your charity, then it must seem important to you, and you’re obviously not doing it for personal gain. If you do charity in a way that benefits you (like gets you a castle), then the personal gain aspect starts looking suspicious. The problem is the people who elevate it from a suspicion to an automatic condemnation. It seems like such a natural thing to do. And it encourages people to be masochists, sacrificing themselves pointlessly in photogenic ways, instead of thinking about what will actually help others. But getting back to the point: kidney donation has an unusually high ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gains. So why do EAs keep doing it? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll speak for myself. It starts with wanting, just once, do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It would be morally fraught to do this with money, since any money you spent on improving your self-image would be denied to the people in malarial regions of Africa who need it the most. But it’s not like there’s anything else you can do with that spare kidney. Still, it’s not just about that. All of this calculating and funging takes a psychic toll. Your brain uses the same emotional heuristics as everyone else’s. No matter how contrarian you pretend to be, deep down it’s hard to make your emotions track what you know is right and not what the rest of the world is telling you. The last Guardian opinion columnist who must be defeated is the Guardian opinion columnist inside your own heart. You want to do just one good thing that you’ll feel unreservedly good about, and where you know somebody’s going to be directly happy at the end of it in a way that doesn’t depend on a giant rickety tower of assumptions. Dylan Matthews wrote: As I’m no doubt the first person to notice, being an adult is hard. You are consistently faced with choices — about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family — that have deep moral consequences, and even when you try the best you can, you’re going to get a lot of those choices wrong. And you more often than not won’t know if you got them wrong or right. Maybe you should’ve picked another job, where you could do more good. Maybe you should’ve gone to grad school. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a new city. So I was selfishly, deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one. …and it really resonated. Everything else I try to do, there’s a little voice inside of me which says “Maybe the haters are right, maybe you’re stupid, maybe you’re just doing the easy things. Maybe you’re no good after all, maybe you’ll never be able to figure any of this out. Maybe you should just give up.” The Talmud is very clear: that voice is called the evil inclination, and it dwells in the left kidney. There is only one way to shut it off forever. I was ready. V. You might not be a masochist. But hospitals are sadists. They want to hear you beg. After I submitted the donation form, I was evaluated by a horde of indistinguishable women. They all had titles like “Transplant Coordinator”, “Financial Coordinator”, and “Patient Care Representative”. Several were social workers; one was a psychiatrist. They would see me through a buggy version of Zoom that caused various parts of their body to suddenly turn into the UCSF logo, and they all had questions like “Are you sure you want to do this?” and “Are you going to regret this later?” and “Is anyone pressuring you to do this?” and “Are you sure you want to do this?” After clearing that gauntlet came the tests. Blood tests - I think I must have given between 20 and 50 vials of blood throughout the screening process. Urine tests - both the normal kind where you pee in a cup, and a more involved kind where you have to store all your urine for 24 hours in a big jug, then take it to the lab. “Urinate into a jug” ought to be the easiest thing in the world, but some of the labs have overly complicated jugs that I, with my mere MD, couldn’t always get right - hence my experience accidentally pouring urine on myself in an Uber. Then came the big guns. Echocardiogram. MRI. One of my urine tests was slightly off, so I also got a nuclear kidney scan, where they injected radioactive liquid in me and monitored how long it took to come out the other end (I remember asking a friend “Can I use your bathroom? My urine might be slightly radioactive today, but it shouldn’t be enough to matter.”) Finally, five months after I originally applied, I got a phone call from the Transplant Coordinator. The test results were in, and . . . I had been rejected because I’d had mild childhood OCD. This was something I’d mentioned offhandedly during one of the psych evaluations. As a child, I used to touch objects in odd patterns that only made sense to me. I got diagnosed with OCD, put on SSRIs for a while, finally did therapy at age 15, hadn’t had any problems since. I still go back on SSRIs sometimes when I’m really stressed, and will grudgingly admit to the occasional odd-pattern-touching when no one’s looking. But it’s nothing anyone would know about if I didn’t tell them! It was mild even at age 15, and it’s been close-to-nonexistent for the past twenty years! Now I’m a successful psychiatrist who owns his own psychiatry practice and helps other people with the condition! I told them all this. They didn’t care. I asked them if there was anything I could do. They said maybe I could go to therapy for six months, then apply again. I asked them what kind of therapy was indicated for mild OCD that’s been in remission for twenty years. They sounded kind of surprised to learn there were different types of therapy and said whatever, just talk to someone or something. I asked them how frequent they thought the therapy needed to be. They sounded kind of surprised to learn that therapy could have different frequencies, and said, you know, therapy, the thing where you talk to someone. I asked them if they actually knew anything about OCD, psychotherapy, or mental health in general, or if they had just vaguely heard rumors that some people were bad and crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions, and that a ritual called “therapy” could absolve one of this impurity. They responded as politely as possible under the circumstances, but didn’t change their mind. I wasn’t going to waste an hour a week for six months, and spend thousands of dollars of my own extremely-not-reimbursed-by-UCSF money, to see a randomly-selected therapist for a condition I’d gotten over twenty years ago, just so I could apply again and get rejected a second time. This was one of the most infuriating and humiliating things that’s ever happened to me. We throw around a lot of terms like “stigma” and “paternalism”, and I’ve worked with patients who have dealt with all these issues (it’s UCSF in particular a surprising amount of the time!). But I was still surprised how much it hurt when it happened to me. Being denied the right to control your own body because of some meaningless diagnosis on a chart somewhere is surprisingly frustrating, even compared to things that should objectively be worse. I thought I was going to be able to do a good deed that I’d been fantasizing about for years, and some jerk administrator torpedoed my dreams because I had once, long ago, had mild mental health issues. So I gave up. I spent the next few weeks unleashing torrents of anti-UCSF abuse at anyone who would listen. This turned out to be very productive! When I was unleashing a torrent of anti-UCSF abuse to Josh Morrison of WaitlistZero, he asked if I’d tried other hospitals. I hadn’t. I’d assumed they were all in cahoots. But Josh said no, each hospital had their own evaluation process. Weill Cornell, a hospital in NYC, was one of the best transplant centers in the country, and had a reputation for fair and thoughtful pre-donor screening. Why didn’t I talk to them? NYC was far away, and I hate to travel, but I was just angry enough to accept. At this point I’d forgotten whatever good altruistic motivations I might have originally had and was fueled entirely by spite. Getting my kidney taken out somewhere else felt like it would be a sort of victory over UCSF. So I went for it. Cornell was lovely. They tried to do as much of the process as they could via Californian intermediaries, so that I only had to fly to New York twice. Their psychiatrist evaluated me, listened to me explain my weak history of OCD, then treated me like a reasonable adult who tells the truth and can handle his own medical decisions. They were concerned that I sometimes self-prescribed Lexapro to deal with anxiety. But we agreed on a compromise: I found another psychiatrist, let her give me the exact same prescription of Lexapro at a much higher cost to my insurance, and that resolved the problem. So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12. VI. I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep. There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked. Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery. A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country. . . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice. Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle. VII. In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%? Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one. This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process. 20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it. (obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint6.) So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it7. When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you! VIII. The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year. Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance. My kidney donation “mentor”8 Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+. (the libertarian in me would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal) This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to still have all of your organs. This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important. If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.9 Feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions about the process. 1Further perspective: I’m 38, which gives me a 2/million total chance of dying per day. So the likelihood that I would die during my kidney operation equals the likelihood that I would die during a randomly chosen two months of everyday life. 2Maybe, kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so close to background that it’s hard to adjust for possible confounders. So the first scientists to study the problem just drew a line through their high-radiation data points and extended it to the low radiation levels - ie if 1 Sievert caused one thousand extra cancers, probably 1 milli-Sievert would cause one extra cancer. This is called the Linear Dose No Threshold (LDNT) model, and has become a subject of intense and acrimonious debate. Some people think that at some very small dose, radiation stops being bad for you at all. Other people think maybe at low enough doses radiation is good for you - see this claim that the atomic bomb “elongated lifespan” in survivors far enough away from the blast. If this were true, CTs probably wouldn’t increase cancer risk at all. I didn’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to take a firm position, and I noticed eminent scientists on both sides, so I am using the more cautious estimate here. 3I told them I had an aunt who died of radiation-induced cancer. It’s true, but I feel grubby for bringing her into this; I thought doctors would be more likely to listen to an emotional story than cold logic. 4EAs have been debating the exact effectiveness of kidney donations for a long time. You can find good skeptical arguments by Jeff Kaufman and Derek Shiller, and good arguments in favor by Alexander Berger and Tom Ash. 5Outside of Philosophy 101 thought experiments, there’s a nonprofit that will often reimburse you for lost wages from your donation. 6Self-modifying into a person who can act boldly without social permission is a more general solution and has many other advantages. But the long version involves living a full life of accumulating moral wisdom, and the short version starts with removing guardrails that are there for good reasons. 7But here are some practical points you might not already appreciate: You shouldn’t have to pay much money. If, like me, you need to travel (eg to New York), kidney related charities will reimburse your travel costs (in theory, I haven’t yet proven this, and a few costs were illegible and I decided not to submit them).
Inline links: bumpy, 4, 5 - 7 extra years of life, improves quality of life, creates a “chain”, $5,000 - $10,000, 5, sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking, WaitlistZero, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7c71!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08cf5218-6398-4dfb-91a3-d5fc7989b754_765x642.png, polls, 5,000, 40,000, Manifest journalism panel, 6, filling out a form, 7, usual, 8, the, here, 9, 1, 2, Linear Dose No Threshold, this claim, 3, 4, Jeff Kaufman, Derek Shiller, Alexander Berger, Tom Ash, 5, 6, 7
Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
There are already lots of good charities that help people directly at scale, for example Against Malaria Foundation (which distributes malaria-preventing bed nets) and GiveDirectly (which gives money directly to very poor people in Africa). I think these are hard to beat.
Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)
July 24, 2025 · Original source
There are already lots of good charities that help people directly at scale, for example Against Malaria Foundation (which distributes malaria-preventing bed nets) and GiveDirectly (which gives money directly to very poor people in Africa). These are hard to beat.
Inline links: Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly
The Pledge
December 17, 2025 · Original source
This is why I was so excited ten-odd years ago when I discovered the Giving What We Can Pledge. It’s a commitment to give a certain percent of your income (originally 10%, but now there’s also a 1-10% “trial” pledge) to the most effective charity you know. If you can’t figure out which charity is most effective, you can just donate to Against Malaria Foundation, like all the other indecisive people.
Inline links: Giving What We Can Pledge, a 1-10% “trial” pledge, Against Malaria Foundation
If you decide you want to do something but it’s too stressful to figure out what, take a 3% trial pledge here, give it to Against Malaria Foundation, and come back next year to see if you’re ready for the 10% version.
Inline links: a 3% trial pledge here
AI Impacts5 mentions across 5 issues

AI Impacts is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 06, 2021 and November 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AI Impacts does , where they try to estimate how capable computers were in 1980, 1990, etc"; "I would want to look at AI Impacts style line graphs"; "The AI forecasting organization AI Impacts actually has a whole report on historical ship size trends". It most often appears alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, Metaculus, AGI.

Article page
AI Impacts
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
August 06, 2021
Last seen
November 30, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
My personal estimates are more like 75% chance, 25% chance, and a distribution that peaks about 20 years later than this one. I think the Metaculus position is consistent with all of “this probably won’t happen”, “THIS IS SUPER-TERRIFYING”, “this is most likely far away”, and “BUT FOR ALL WE KNOW IT COULD BE TOMORROW!” I realize this is an annoying way for things to be. ————————————————— CraigMichael writes: >But all the AI regulation in the world won’t help us unless we humans resist the urge to spread misinformation to maximize clicks. Was with you up to this point. There are several solutions to this other than willpower (resisting the urge). The basic idea - change incentives so that while spreading misinformation is possible but substantially less desirable/lucrative than other options for online behaviors. This isn’t so hard to imagine. Say there’s a lot of incentives to earn money online doing creative or useful things. Like Mechanical Turk, but less route behavior and more performing a service or matching needs. Like I wish I had a help desk for English questions where the answers were good and not people posturing to look good to other people on the English Stack Exchange, for example. I would pay them per call or per minute or whatever. Totally unexplored market AFAIK because technology hasn’t been developed yet. Another idea - Give people more options to pay at an article-level for information that’s useful to them or to have related questions answered or something like that without needing a subscription or a bundle. Say there’s some article about anything and I want to contact the author and be like “hey, here’s a related question, I’m willing to offer you X dollars to answer.” The person says “I’ll do it for x+10 dollars.” One site used to unlock articles to the public after a threshold of Bitcoin have been donated on a PPV basis. It both incentives the author and had a positive externality. Everyone is so invested in ads that they don’t work on technology and ideas to create new markets. To paraphrase Jaron Lanier we need to make technology so good it seduces away from destroying ourselves. Partly I want to complain that obviously I was using the quoted sentence as a rhetorical device. But I guess the whole point of that sentence and its paragraph was to argue against saying false things as a rhetorical device, so - hoist on my own petard, I guess. I’m less optimistic than Craig is about this solution, because it seems to me that socially virtuous technology will always be less fun/addictive than nonvirtuous technology, simply because the virtuous technology has to hit two targets (virtuous, fun/addictive), the nonvirtuous technology only has to hit one target, and it’s easier to optimize for a target with zero other constraints than with one other constraint. See eg Meditations on Moloch. ————————————————— Souf asks: Is there a convincing argument that AGI is possible within any reasonable timeframe (like... 50 years), other than the intuitions of esteemed AI researchers? Do they have any way to back up their estimates (of some tens of percent), and why they shouldn't be millionths of a percent? It is, as another poster said, an "extraordinary claim." I'd like to see some extraordinary support of those particular numbers. If I had to answer this question, I would point to the sorts of work AI Impacts does, where they try to estimate how capable computers were in 1980, 1990, etc, draw a line to represent the speed at which computers are becoming more capable, figure out where humans are at the same metric, and check the time when that line crosses however capable you’ve decided humans are. This is obviously really hard because you have to operationalize some definition of “capable” or “intelligent” or some other word that is hard to operationalize, but when you do it you usually get sometime in the mid-21st century. You’re going to point out that this argument doesn’t really qualify as “convincing”. I admit it doesn’t meet trial-by-jury standards of evidence. So I guess my real answer would be “it’s the #$@&ing prior”. Like, you certainly don’t have knock-down evidence that it’s impossible, I don’t have a knock-down evidence that it’s certain, so it might happen and it might not. How “might” are we talking? I don’t know, it would seem weird if this quickly-advancing technology being researched by incredibly smart people with billions of dollars in research funding from lots of megacorporations just reached some point and then stopped. Okay, fine, maybe it will keep advancing at the same rate, how fast is that in terms of time-to-AGI? Now we’re back at AI Impacts drawing lines again. The stupidest possible prior is always 50-50. We would have to be very stupid people to use the stupidest possible prior. But here we are. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing FTL travel by 2100, because FTL travel seems physically impossible. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing slower-than-light-but-still-pretty-good starships by 2100, because, I dunno, space travel isn’t advancing that fast and nobody is really working on it that hard. For AI, I don’t know, I kinda want to say 50-50. If I were going to try to update away from 50-50, I would want to look at AI Impacts style line graphs, expert opinion, and prediction markets. All of those seem to make me update up instead of down, so I don’t think I would go lower than 50-50. But there’s enough Knightian uncertainty to make an entire Round Table here, so who knows? Hardly a “convincing” argument, but I’m just trying to avoid the McAfee Fallacy: ————————————————— Souf continues: The argument that we are "in the middle of a period of extremely rapid progress in AI research, when barrier after barrier is being breached" makes it seem like all AI "progress" is on some sort of line that ends in AGI. That feels like sleight-of-hand. Even Scott himself refers to AGI here as a "new class of actor," so I'm failing to see how current lines of "progress" will indubitably result the emergence of something completely novel and different? Lots of smart people disagree with me on this one, but I think the path from here to AGI is pretty straight. I mean, it will take thousands of people who are all much smarter than I am to do it, but it’ll happen. My argument is something like - human brains are remarkably similar to rat brains, only much bigger. They’re still a little similar to insect brains. It looks like if you have a basic functioning brain, and you scale it up, it gets human intelligence. Existing AIs like AlphaGo or GPT seem to be basically a blob of learning-ability, a plan for pointing the blob at a specific problem, and lots and lots of training data. I think the past five years have shown that this basic model generalizes really well. OpenAI’s programs can now write essays, compose music, and generate pictures, not because they had three parallel amazing teams working on writing/music/art AIs, but because they took a blob of learning ability and figured out how to direct it at writing/music/art, and they were able to get giant digital corpuses of text / music / pictures to train it. DeepMind is finding that it can win lots of games, from Go to StarCraft to obstacle courses in simulated environments, by pointing a blob of learning-ability at the game and making it play against itself a zillion times (ie generate its own training data). My impression is that human/rat/insect brains are a blob of learning-ability which the rest of the nervous system successfully points at the world, and especially at aspects of the world that the organism needs to pay attention to (eg food sources, sex, etc). This isn’t exactly right, there are a few genetically-encoded programs, but not that many and it’s pretty hard. Right now I think our main advantages over AI systems are something like: our nervous system is pretty good at pointing us at the world and extracting training data from it. If you wanted an AI that learned being-in-the-world skills as well as we do, it would have to have an amazing robot body, and right now robot bodies aren’t that amazing.
Inline links: writes, Meditations on Moloch, Souf, the sorts of work AI Impacts does, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3MgL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7db78f49-9ccb-4b6e-ac18-cfb79f52cb04_584x232.png, not that many and it’s pretty hard
Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
The AI forecasting organization AI Impacts actually has a whole report on historical ship size trends to prove an unrelated point about technological progress, so I didn’t even have to make this graph up. Suppose our Victorian scientist lived in 1858, right when the Great Eastern was launched. The trend line for ship size crossed 100m around 1843, and 200m in 1858, so doubling time is 15 years - but perhaps they notice this is going to be an outlier, so let’s round up a bit and say 18 years. The (one order of magnitude off estimate for the size of the) Moon is 350,000m, so you’d need ships to scale up by 350,000/200 = 1,750x before they’re as big as the Moon. That’s about 10.8 doublings, and a doubling time is 18 years, so we’ll get spaceships in . . . 2052 exactly. (fudging numbers to land where you want is actually fun and easy) SS Great Eastern, the extreme outlier large steamship from 1858. This has become sort of a mascot for quantitative technological progress forecasters. What is this scientist’s error? The big one is thinking that spaceship progress depends on some easily-measured quantity (size) instead of on fundamental advances (eg figuring out how rockets work). You can make the same accusation against Ajeya et al: you can have all the FLOPs in the world, but if you don’t understand how to make a machine think, your AI will be, well, a flop. Ajeya discusses this a bit on page 143 of her report. There is some sense in which FLOPs and knowing-what-you’re-doing trade of against each other. If you have literally no idea what you’re doing, you can sort of kind of re-run evolution until it comes up with something that looks good. If things are somehow even worse than that, you could always run AIXI, a hypothetical AI design guaranteed to get excellent results as long as you have infinite computation. You could run a Go engine by searching the entire branching tree structure of Go - you shouldn’t, and it would take a zillion times more compute than exists in the entire world, but you could. So in some sense what you’re doing, when you’re figuring out what you’re doing, is coming up with ways to do already-possible things more efficiently. But that’s just algorithmic progress, which Ajeya has already baked into her model. (our Victorian scientist: “As a reductio ad absurdum, you could always stand the ship on its end, and then climb up it to reach space. We’re just trying to make ships that are more efficient than that.”) Part II: Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works Eliezer Yudkowsky presents a more subtle version of these kinds of objection in an essay called Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works, published December 2021. Ajeya’s report is a 169-page collection of equations, graphs, and modeling assumptions. Yudkowsky’s rebuttal is a fictional dialogue between himself, younger versions of himself, famous AI scientists, and other bit players. At one point, a character called “Humbali” shows up begging Yudkowsky to be more humble, and Yudkowsky defeats him with devastating counterarguments. Still, he did found the field, so I guess everyone has to listen to him. He starts: in 1988, famous AI scientist Hans Moravec predicted human-level AI by 2010. He was using the same methodology as Ajeya: extrapolate how quickly processing power would grow (in FLOP/S), and see when it would match some estimate of the human brain. Moravec got the processing power almost exactly right (it hit his 2010 projection in 2008) and his human brain estimate pretty close (he says 10^13 FLOP/S, Ajeya says 10^15, this 2 OOM difference only delays things a few years), yet there was not human-level AI in 2010. What happened? Ajeya's answer could be: Moravec didn't realize that, in the modern ML paradigm, any given size of program requires a much bigger program to train. Ajeya, who has a 35-year advantage on Moravec, estimates approximately the same power for the finished program (10^16 vs. 10^13 FLOP/S) but says that training the 10^16 FLOP/S program will require 10^33ish FLOPs. Eliezer agrees as far as it goes, but says this points to a much deeper failure mode, which was that Moravec had no idea what he was doing. He was assuming processing power of human brain = processing power of computer necessary for AGI. Why? The human brain consumes around 20 watts of power. Can we thereby conclude that an AGI should consume around 20 watts of power, and that, when technology advances to the point of being able to supply around 20 watts of power to computers, we'll get AGI? […] You say that AIs consume energy in a very different way from brains? Well, they'll also consume computations in a very different way from brains! The only difference between these two cases is that you know something about how humans eat food and break it down in their stomachs and convert it into ATP that gets consumed by neurons to pump ions back out of dendrites and axons, while computer chips consume electricity whose flow gets interrupted by transistors to transmit information. Since you know anything whatsoever about how AGIs and humans consume energy, you can see that the consumption is so vastly different as to obviate all comparisons entirely. You are ignorant of how the brain consumes computation, you are ignorant of how the first AGIs built would consume computation, but "an unknown key does not open an unknown lock" and these two ignorant distributions should not assert much internal correlation between them. Cars don’t move by contracting their leg muscles and planes don’t fly by flapping their wings like birds. Telescopes do form images the same way as the lenses in our eyes, but differ by so many orders of magnitude in every important way that they defy comparison. Why should AI be different? You have to use some specific algorithm when you’re creating AI; why should we expect it to be anywhere near the same efficiency as the ones Nature uses in our brains? The same is true for arguments from evolution, eg Ajeya’s Evolutionary Anchor, ie “it took evolution 10^43 FLOPs of computation to evolve the human brain so maybe that will be the training cost”. AI scientists sitting in labs trying to figure things out, and nematodes getting eaten by other nematodes, are such different methods for designing things that it’s crazy to use one as an estimate for the other. Algorithmic Progress vs. Algorithmic Paradigm Shifts This post is a dialogue, so (Eliezer’s hypothetical model of) OpenPhil gets a chance to respond. They object: this is why we put a term for algorithmic progress in our model. The model isn’t very sensitive to changes in that term. If you want you can set it to some kind of crazy high value and see what happens, but you can’t say we didn’t consider it. OpenPhil: We did already consider that and try to take it into account: our model already includes a parameter for how algorithmic progress reduces hardware requirements. It's not easy to graph as exactly as Moore's Law, as you say, but our best-guess estimate is that compute costs halve every 2-3 years […] Eliezer: The makers of AGI aren't going to be doing 10,000,000,000,000 rounds of gradient descent, on entire brain-sized 300,000,000,000,000-parameter models, algorithmically faster than today. They're going to get to AGI via some route that you don't know how to take, at least if it happens in 2040. If it happens in 2025, it may be via a route that some modern researchers do know how to take, but in this case, of course, your model was also wrong. They're not going to be taking your default-imagined approach algorithmically faster, they're going to be taking an algorithmically different approach that eats computing power in a different way than you imagine it being consumed. OpenPhil: Shouldn't that just be folded into our estimate of how the computation required to accomplish a fixed task decreases by half every 2-3 years due to better algorithms? Eliezer: Backtesting this viewpoint on the previous history of computer science, it seems to me to assert that it should be possible to: Train a pre-Transformer RNN/CNN-based model, not using any other techniques invented after 2017, to GPT-2 levels of performance, using only around 2x as much compute as GPT-2;
Inline links: a whole report on historical ship size trends, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRDj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fde3d97f4-afca-45c4-9ed2-521cd25041df_460x262.jpeg, AIXI, Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works
Play pro-level Go using 8-16 times as much computing power as AlphaGo, but only 2006 levels of technology. For reference, recall that in 2006, Hinton and Salakhutdinov were just starting to publish that, by training multiple layers of Restricted Boltzmann machines and then unrolling them into a "deep" neural network, you could get an initialization for the network weights that would avoid the problem of vanishing and exploding gradients and activations. At least so long as you didn't try to stack too many layers, like a dozen layers or something ridiculous like that. This being the point that kicked off the entire deep-learning revolution. Your model apparently suggests that we have gotten around 50 times more efficient at turning computation into intelligence since that time; so, we should be able to replicate any modern feat of deep learning performed in 2021, using techniques from before deep learning and around fifty times as much computing power. OpenPhil: No, that's totally not what our viewpoint says when you backfit it to past reality. Our model does a great job of retrodicting past reality. Eliezer: How so? OpenPhil: <Eliezer cannot predict what they will say here.> I think the argument here is that OpenPhil is accounting for normal scientific progress in algorithms, but not for paradigm shifts. Directional Error These are the two arguments Eliezer makes against OpenPhil that I find most persuasive. First, that you shouldn’t be using biological anchors at all. Second, that unpredictable paradigm shifts are more realistic than gradual algorithmic progress. These mostly add uncertainty to OpenPhil’s model, but Eliezer ends his essay making a stronger argument: he thinks OpenPhil is directionally wrong, and AI will come earlier than they think. Mostly this is the paradigm argument again. Five years from now, there could be a paradigm shift that makes AI much easier to build. It’s happened before; from GOFAI’s pre-programmed logical rules to Deep Blue’s tree searches to the sorts of Big Data methods that won the Netflix Prize to modern deep learning. Instead of just extrapolating deep learning scaling thirty years out, OpenPhil should be worried about the next big idea. Hypothetical OpenPhil retorts that this is a double-edged sword. Maybe the deep learning paradigm can’t produce AGI, and we’ll have to wait decades or centuries for someone to have the right insight. Or maybe the new paradigm you need for AGI will take more compute than deep learning, in the same way deep learning takes more compute than whatever Moravec was imagining. This is a pretty strong response, since it would have been true for every previous forecaster: remember, Moravec erred in thinking AI would come too soon, not too late. So although Eliezer is taking the cheap shot of saying OpenPhil’s estimate will be wrong just as everyone else’s was wrong before, he’s also giving himself the much harder case of arguing it might be wrong in the opposite direction as all its predecessors. Eliezer takes this objection seriously, but feels like on balance probably new paradigms will speed up AI rather than slow it down. Here he grudgingly and with suitable embarrassment does try to make an object-level semi-biological-anchors-related argument: Moravec was wrong because he ignored the training phase. And the proper anchor for the training phase is somewhere between evolution and a human childhood, where evolution represents “blind chance eventually finding good things” and human childhood represents “an intelligent cognitive engine trying to squeeze as much data out of experience as possible”. And part of what he expects paradigm shifts to do is to move from more evolutionary processes to more childhood-like processes, and that’s a net gain in efficiency. So he still thinks OpenPhil’s methods are more likely to overestimate the amount of time until AGI rather than underestimate it. What Moore’s Law Giveth, Platt’s Law Taketh Away Eliezer’s other argument is kind of a low blow: he refers to Platt’s Law Of AI Forecasting: “any AI forecast will put strong AI thirty years out from when the forecast is made.” This isn’t exact. Hans Moravec, writing in 1988, said 2010 - so 22 years. Ray Kurzweil, writing in 2001, said 2023 - another 22 years. Vernor Vinge, in a 1993 speech, said 2023, and that was exactly 30 years, but Vinge knew about Platt’s Law and might have been joking. The point is: OpenPhil wrote a report in 2020 that predicted strong AI in 2052, isn’t that kind of suspicious? I’d previously mentioned it as a plus that Ajeya got around the same year everyone else got. The forecasters on Metaculus. The experts surveyed in Grace et al. Lots of other smart experts with clever models. But what if all of these experts and models and analyses are just fudging the numbers for the same Platt’s-Law-related reasons? Hypothetical OpenPhil is BTFO: OpenPhil: That part about Charles Platt's generalization is interesting, but just because we unwittingly chose literally exactly the median that Platt predicted people would always choose in consistent error, that doesn't justify dismissing our work, right? We could have used a completely valid method of estimation which would have pointed to 2050 no matter which year it was tried in, and, by sheer coincidence, have first written that up in 2020. In fact, we try to show in the report that the same methodology, evaluated in earlier years, would also have pointed to around 2050 - Eliezer: Look, people keep trying this. It's never worked. It's never going to work. 2 years before the end of the world, there'll be another published biologically inspired estimate showing that AGI is 30 years away and it will be exactly as informative then as it is now. I'd love to know the timelines too, but you're not going to get the answer you want until right before the end of the world, and maybe not even then unless you're paying very close attention. Timing this stuff is just plain hard. Part III: Responses And Commentary Response 1: Less Wrong Comments Less Wrong is a site founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky for Eliezer Yudkowsky fans who wanted to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s ideas. So, for whatever it’s worth - the comments on his essay were pretty negative. Carl Shulman, an independent researcher with links to both OpenPhil and MIRI (Eliezer’s org), writes the top-voted comment. He works from a model where there is hardware progress, software progress downstream of hardware progress, and independent (ie unrelated to algorithms) software progress, and where the first two make up most progress on the margin. Researchers generally develop new paradigms once they have enough compute available to tinker with them. Progress in AI has largely been a function of increasing compute, human software research efforts, and serial time/steps. Throwing more compute at researchers has improved performance both directly and indirectly (e.g. by enabling more experiments, refining evaluation functions in chess, training neural networks, or making algorithms that work best with large compute more attractive). Historically compute has grown by many orders of magnitude, while human labor applied to AI and supporting software by only a few. And on plausible decompositions of progress (allowing for adjustment of software to current hardware and vice versa), hardware growth accounts for more of the progress over time than human labor input growth. So if you're going to use an AI production function for tech forecasting based on inputs (which do relatively OK by the standards tech forecasting), it's best to use all of compute, labor, and time, but it makes sense for compute to have pride of place and take in more modeling effort and attention, since it's the biggest source of change (particularly when including software gains downstream of hardware technology and expenditures). […] A perfectly correlated time series of compute and labor would not let us say which had the larger marginal contribution, but we have resources to get at that, which I was referring to with 'plausible decompositions.' This includes experiments with old and new software and hardware, like the chess ones Paul recently commissioned, and studies by AI Impacts, OpenAI, and Neil Thompson. There are AI scaling experiments, and observations of the results of shocks like the end of Dennard scaling, the availability of GPGPU computing, and Besiroglu's data on the relative predictive power of computer and labor in individual papers and subfields. In different ways those tend to put hardware as driving more log improvement than software (with both contributing), particularly if we consider software innovations downstream of hardware changes. Vanessa Kosoy makes the obvious objection, which echoes a comment of Eliezer’s in the dialogue above: I'm confused how can this pass some obvious tests. For example, do you claim that alpha-beta pruning can match AlphaGo given some not-crazy advantage in compute? Do you claim that SVMs can do SOTA image classification with not-crazy advantage in compute (or with any amount of compute with the same training data)? Can Eliza-style chatbots compete with GPT3 however we scale them up? Mark Xu answers: My model is something like: For any given algorithm, e.g. SVMs, AlphaGo, alpha-beta pruning, convnets, etc., there is an "effective compute regime" where dumping more compute makes them better. If you go above this regime, you get steep diminishing marginal returns.
Inline links: normal scientific progress in algorithms, but not for paradigm shifts, Platt’s Law Of AI Forecasting, the comments, Paul recently commissioned, AI Impacts, OpenAI, Neil Thompson, Besiroglu's, Vanessa Kosoy, Mark Xu
I wanted to compare Fritz (which won WCCC in 1995) to a modern engine to understand the effects of hardware and software performance. I think the time controls for that tournament are similar to SF STC I think. I wanted to compare to SF8 rather than one of the NNUE engines to isolate out the effect of compute at development time and just look at test-time compute. So having modern algorithms would have let you win WCCC while spending about 50x less on compute than the winner. Having modern computer hardware would have let you win WCCC spending way more than 1000x less on compute than the winner. Measured this way software progress seems to be several times less important than hardware progress despite much faster scale-up of investment in software. But instead of asking "how well does hardware/software progress help you get to 1995 performance?" you could ask "how well does hardware/software progress get you to 2015 performance?" and on that metric it looks like software progress is way more important because you basically just can't scale old algorithms up to modern performance. The relevant measure varies depending on what you are asking. But from the perspective of takeoff speeds, it seems to me like one very salient takeaway is: if one chess project had literally come back in time with 20 years of chess progress, it would have allowed them to spend 50x less on compute than the leader. Response 2: AI Impacts + Matthew Barnett AI Impacts gathered and analyzed a dataset of who predicted AI when; Matthew Barnett helpfully drew in the line corresponding to Platt’s Law (everyone always predicts AI in thirty years). Just eyeballing it, Platt’s Law looks pretty good. But Holden Karnofsky (see below) objects that our eyeballs are covertly removing outliers. Barnett agrees this is worth checking for and runs a formal OLS regression. Platt’s Law in blue, regression line in orange. He writes: I agree this trendline doesn't look great for Platt's law, and backs up your observation by predicting that Bio Anchors should be more than 30 years out. However, OLS is notoriously sensitive to outliers. If instead of using some more robust regression algorithm, we instead super arbitrarily eliminated all predictions after 2100, then we get this, which doesn't look absolutely horrible for the law. Note that the median forecast is 25 years out. I’m split on what to think here. If we consider a weaker version of Platt’s Law, “the average date at which people forecast AGI moves forward at about one year per year”, this seems truish in the big picture where we compare 1960 to today, but not obviously true after 1980. If we consider a different weaker version, “on average estimates tend to be 30 years away”, that’s true-ish under Barnett’s revised model, but not inherently damning since Barnett’s assuming there will be some such number, it turns out to be 25, and Ajeya gave the somewhat different number of 32. Is that a big enough difference to exonerate her of “using” Platt’s Law? Is that even the right way to be thinking about this question? Response 3: Real OpenPhil The hypothetical OpenPhil in Eliezer’s mind having been utterly vanquished, the real-world OpenPhil is forced to step in. OpenPhil CEO Holden Karnofsky responds to Eliezer here. There’s a lot of back and forth about whether the report includes enough caveats (answer: it sure does include a lot of caveats!) but I was most interested in the attacks on Eliezer’s two main points. First, the point that biological anchors are fatally flawed from the start and measuring FLOP/S is no better than measuring power consumption in watts. Holden: If the world were such that: We had some reasonable framework for "power usage" that didn't include gratuitously wasted power, and measured the "power used meaningfully to do computations" in some important sense;
Inline links: AI Impacts, Matthew Barnett, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!17-W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa751f624-0392-4610-8a93-7bb94a60d1b3_1182x778.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!54Vh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c354075-ecaa-4807-a1a5-07931736f093_403x268.png, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dw02!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F797aef17-dc24-4845-9e00-2c3fd7f7dc32_403x268.png, here
Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
8th: Zach Stein-Perlman. Zach entered under the pseudonym “My expected score is slightly worse than it would be if I always gave my true probabilities. I mention this in case you want to exclude me from analysis for that reason. (The form says "there is no strategic advantage to putting anything other than your honest predictions for each event", but this is totally false: I don't care about expected score, just probability of doing very well. If Scott had said to be honest, I would have, but instead he said "The winner will get eternal glory" so I'm lazily* maximizing winning probability. *If the universe was at stake, I would consider other tactics, but it's not, so I'm just being overconfident”, but I was able to figure out who he was from the email address. Zach is a forecaster and research analyst at AI Impacts, a nonprofit (founded by my ex-girlfriend) that tries to predict the future course of AI.
Inline links: AI Impacts
Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)
March 14, 2023 · Original source
Maybe some jump like this could take an AI from IQ 90 to IQ 1000 with no (or very short) period of IQ 200 in between (is this plausible? See AI Impacts’ Discontinuous Progress In History). This kind of jump could happen in intelligence, coherence, or both at once. In this case, we would be very unprepared, and there would be no slightly-dumber-aligned-AIs to help us figure it out.
Inline links: Discontinuous Progress In History
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
Effective altruism is composed of lots of organizations like GiveWell and GivingWhatWeCan and 80,000 Hours and AI Impacts. Ask the question for each one of them:
Why do we need AI Impacts? To try to predict the future course of advanced AI. No contradiction there either.
You could imagine a world where all these same organizations and people exist, but none of them used the label “effective altruism”. But it would be a weird world. All these groups support each other, always in spirit but sometimes also financially. Staff move from one to another. There are conferences where they all meet and talk about their common interest of promoting effective charitable work. What are you supposed to call the conference? The Conference For The Extensional Set Consisting Of GiveWell, GivingWhatWeCan, 80,000 Hours, AI Impacts, And A Few Dozen Other Groups We Won’t Bother Naming, But This Really Is An Extensional Definition, Trust Us?
AlphaGo5 mentions across 5 issues

AlphaGo is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 08, 2021 and November 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat first Fan Hui"; "using 8-16 times as much computing power as AlphaGo"; "AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines)". It most often appears alongside DeepMind, Eliezer, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Article page
AlphaGo
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
February 08, 2021
Last seen
November 20, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
21
February 08, 2021 · Original source
First, some history. In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat first Fan Hui, a medium-level professional Go player, and then Lee Sedol, a top professional Go player. This was one of the more unexpected events in AI history; everyone thought it would be a few more years before Go AIs were ready for prime time. We can see this on Metaculus; their prediction that a Go program would beat a professional went from 30% before the Fan Hui match to 90% afterwards (there was some debate on whether the Fan Hui match was official enough to count, so it wasn’t 100, but everyone agreed that beating Fan Hui meant the program could probably beat other people in more official settings. After that people thought it was moderately likely AlphaGo could beat Lee Sedol too, and they were right.
Prediction markets clearly aren’t magic; they didn’t expect AlphaGo’s victory over Hui any more than anyone else did (maybe a little more than some other people? they did give it 30%). But it’s interesting being able to quantify the exact degree to which people thought it was unlikely at the time, and when exactly that changed.
Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
Play pro-level Go using 8-16 times as much computing power as AlphaGo, but only 2006 levels of technology.
Play pro-level Go using 8-16 times as much computing power as AlphaGo, but only 2006 levels of technology. For reference, recall that in 2006, Hinton and Salakhutdinov were just starting to publish that, by training multiple layers of Restricted Boltzmann machines and then unrolling them into a "deep" neural network, you could get an initialization for the network weights that would avoid the problem of vanishing and exploding gradients and activations. At least so long as you didn't try to stack too many layers, like a dozen layers or something ridiculous like that. This being the point that kicked off the entire deep-learning revolution. Your model apparently suggests that we have gotten around 50 times more efficient at turning computation into intelligence since that time; so, we should be able to replicate any modern feat of deep learning performed in 2021, using techniques from before deep learning and around fifty times as much computing power. OpenPhil: No, that's totally not what our viewpoint says when you backfit it to past reality. Our model does a great job of retrodicting past reality. Eliezer: How so? OpenPhil: <Eliezer cannot predict what they will say here.> I think the argument here is that OpenPhil is accounting for normal scientific progress in algorithms, but not for paradigm shifts. Directional Error These are the two arguments Eliezer makes against OpenPhil that I find most persuasive. First, that you shouldn’t be using biological anchors at all. Second, that unpredictable paradigm shifts are more realistic than gradual algorithmic progress. These mostly add uncertainty to OpenPhil’s model, but Eliezer ends his essay making a stronger argument: he thinks OpenPhil is directionally wrong, and AI will come earlier than they think. Mostly this is the paradigm argument again. Five years from now, there could be a paradigm shift that makes AI much easier to build. It’s happened before; from GOFAI’s pre-programmed logical rules to Deep Blue’s tree searches to the sorts of Big Data methods that won the Netflix Prize to modern deep learning. Instead of just extrapolating deep learning scaling thirty years out, OpenPhil should be worried about the next big idea. Hypothetical OpenPhil retorts that this is a double-edged sword. Maybe the deep learning paradigm can’t produce AGI, and we’ll have to wait decades or centuries for someone to have the right insight. Or maybe the new paradigm you need for AGI will take more compute than deep learning, in the same way deep learning takes more compute than whatever Moravec was imagining. This is a pretty strong response, since it would have been true for every previous forecaster: remember, Moravec erred in thinking AI would come too soon, not too late. So although Eliezer is taking the cheap shot of saying OpenPhil’s estimate will be wrong just as everyone else’s was wrong before, he’s also giving himself the much harder case of arguing it might be wrong in the opposite direction as all its predecessors. Eliezer takes this objection seriously, but feels like on balance probably new paradigms will speed up AI rather than slow it down. Here he grudgingly and with suitable embarrassment does try to make an object-level semi-biological-anchors-related argument: Moravec was wrong because he ignored the training phase. And the proper anchor for the training phase is somewhere between evolution and a human childhood, where evolution represents “blind chance eventually finding good things” and human childhood represents “an intelligent cognitive engine trying to squeeze as much data out of experience as possible”. And part of what he expects paradigm shifts to do is to move from more evolutionary processes to more childhood-like processes, and that’s a net gain in efficiency. So he still thinks OpenPhil’s methods are more likely to overestimate the amount of time until AGI rather than underestimate it. What Moore’s Law Giveth, Platt’s Law Taketh Away Eliezer’s other argument is kind of a low blow: he refers to Platt’s Law Of AI Forecasting: “any AI forecast will put strong AI thirty years out from when the forecast is made.” This isn’t exact. Hans Moravec, writing in 1988, said 2010 - so 22 years. Ray Kurzweil, writing in 2001, said 2023 - another 22 years. Vernor Vinge, in a 1993 speech, said 2023, and that was exactly 30 years, but Vinge knew about Platt’s Law and might have been joking. The point is: OpenPhil wrote a report in 2020 that predicted strong AI in 2052, isn’t that kind of suspicious? I’d previously mentioned it as a plus that Ajeya got around the same year everyone else got. The forecasters on Metaculus. The experts surveyed in Grace et al. Lots of other smart experts with clever models. But what if all of these experts and models and analyses are just fudging the numbers for the same Platt’s-Law-related reasons? Hypothetical OpenPhil is BTFO: OpenPhil: That part about Charles Platt's generalization is interesting, but just because we unwittingly chose literally exactly the median that Platt predicted people would always choose in consistent error, that doesn't justify dismissing our work, right? We could have used a completely valid method of estimation which would have pointed to 2050 no matter which year it was tried in, and, by sheer coincidence, have first written that up in 2020. In fact, we try to show in the report that the same methodology, evaluated in earlier years, would also have pointed to around 2050 - Eliezer: Look, people keep trying this. It's never worked. It's never going to work. 2 years before the end of the world, there'll be another published biologically inspired estimate showing that AGI is 30 years away and it will be exactly as informative then as it is now. I'd love to know the timelines too, but you're not going to get the answer you want until right before the end of the world, and maybe not even then unless you're paying very close attention. Timing this stuff is just plain hard. Part III: Responses And Commentary Response 1: Less Wrong Comments Less Wrong is a site founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky for Eliezer Yudkowsky fans who wanted to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s ideas. So, for whatever it’s worth - the comments on his essay were pretty negative. Carl Shulman, an independent researcher with links to both OpenPhil and MIRI (Eliezer’s org), writes the top-voted comment. He works from a model where there is hardware progress, software progress downstream of hardware progress, and independent (ie unrelated to algorithms) software progress, and where the first two make up most progress on the margin. Researchers generally develop new paradigms once they have enough compute available to tinker with them. Progress in AI has largely been a function of increasing compute, human software research efforts, and serial time/steps. Throwing more compute at researchers has improved performance both directly and indirectly (e.g. by enabling more experiments, refining evaluation functions in chess, training neural networks, or making algorithms that work best with large compute more attractive). Historically compute has grown by many orders of magnitude, while human labor applied to AI and supporting software by only a few. And on plausible decompositions of progress (allowing for adjustment of software to current hardware and vice versa), hardware growth accounts for more of the progress over time than human labor input growth. So if you're going to use an AI production function for tech forecasting based on inputs (which do relatively OK by the standards tech forecasting), it's best to use all of compute, labor, and time, but it makes sense for compute to have pride of place and take in more modeling effort and attention, since it's the biggest source of change (particularly when including software gains downstream of hardware technology and expenditures). […] A perfectly correlated time series of compute and labor would not let us say which had the larger marginal contribution, but we have resources to get at that, which I was referring to with 'plausible decompositions.' This includes experiments with old and new software and hardware, like the chess ones Paul recently commissioned, and studies by AI Impacts, OpenAI, and Neil Thompson. There are AI scaling experiments, and observations of the results of shocks like the end of Dennard scaling, the availability of GPGPU computing, and Besiroglu's data on the relative predictive power of computer and labor in individual papers and subfields. In different ways those tend to put hardware as driving more log improvement than software (with both contributing), particularly if we consider software innovations downstream of hardware changes. Vanessa Kosoy makes the obvious objection, which echoes a comment of Eliezer’s in the dialogue above: I'm confused how can this pass some obvious tests. For example, do you claim that alpha-beta pruning can match AlphaGo given some not-crazy advantage in compute? Do you claim that SVMs can do SOTA image classification with not-crazy advantage in compute (or with any amount of compute with the same training data)? Can Eliza-style chatbots compete with GPT3 however we scale them up? Mark Xu answers: My model is something like: For any given algorithm, e.g. SVMs, AlphaGo, alpha-beta pruning, convnets, etc., there is an "effective compute regime" where dumping more compute makes them better. If you go above this regime, you get steep diminishing marginal returns.
Inline links: normal scientific progress in algorithms, but not for paradigm shifts, Platt’s Law Of AI Forecasting, the comments, Paul recently commissioned, AI Impacts, OpenAI, Neil Thompson, Besiroglu's, Vanessa Kosoy, Mark Xu
For any given algorithm, e.g. SVMs, AlphaGo, alpha-beta pruning, convnets, etc., there is an "effective compute regime" where dumping more compute makes them better. If you go above this regime, you get steep diminishing marginal returns.
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 04, 2022 · Original source
Chess AI performance over time. Why does this matter? If there’s a slow takeoff (ie gradual exponential curve), it will become obvious that some kind of terrifying transformative AI revolution is happening, before the situation gets apocalyptic. There will be time to prepare, to test slightly-below-human AIs and see how they respond, to get governments and other stakeholders on board. We don’t have to get every single thing right ahead of time. On the other hand, because this is proceeding along the usual channels, it will be the usual variety of muddled and hard-to-control. With the exception of a few big actors like the US and Chinese government, and maybe the biggest corporations like Google, the outcome will be determined less by any one agent, and more by the usual multi-agent dynamics of political and economic competition. There will be lots of opportunities to affect things, but no real locus of control to do the affecting. If there’s a fast takeoff (ie sudden FOOM), there won’t be much warning. Conventional wisdom will still say that transformative AI is thirty years away. All the necessary pieces (ie AI alignment theory) will have to be ready ahead of time, prepared blindly without any experimental trial-and-error, to load into the AI as soon as it exists. On the plus side, a single actor (whoever has this first AI) will have complete control over the process. If this actor is smart (and presumably they’re a little smart, or they wouldn’t be the first team to invent transformative AI), they can do everything right without going through the usual government-lobbying channels. So the slower a takeoff you expect, the less you should be focusing on getting every technical detail right ahead of time, and the more you should be working on building the capacity to steer government and corporate policy to direct an incoming slew of new technologies. Yudkowsky Contra Christiano Eliezer counters that although progress may retroactively look gradual and continuous when you know what metric to graph it on, it doesn’t necessarily look that way in real life by the measures that real people care about. (one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. ) So Eliezer is much less impressed by the history of previous technologies than Paul is. He’s also skeptical of the “GDP will double in 4 years before it doubles in 1” claim, because of two contingent disagreements and two fundamental disagreements. The first contingent disagreement: government regulations make it hard to deploy imperfect things, and non-trivial to deploy things even after they’re perfect. Eliezer has non-jokingly said he thinks AI might destroy the world before the average person can buy a self-driving car. Why? Because the government has to approve self-driving cars (and can drag its feet on that), but the apocalypse can happen even without government approval. In Paul’s model, sometime long before superintelligence we should have AIs that can drive cars, and that increases GDP and contributes to a general sense that exciting things are going on. Eliezer says: fine, what if that’s true? Who cares if self-driving cars will be practical a few years before the world is destroyed? It’ll take longer than that to lobby the government to allow them on the road. The second contingent disagreement: superintelligent AIs can lie to us. Suppose you have an AI which wants to destroy humanity, whose IQ is doubling every six months. Right now it’s at IQ 200, and it suspects that it would take IQ 800 to build a human-destroying superweapon. Its best strategy is to lie low for a year. If it expects humans would turn it off if they knew how close it was to superweapons, it can pretend to be less intelligent than it really is. The period when AIs are holding back so we don’t discover their true power level looks like a period of lower-than-expected GDP growth - followed by a sudden FOOM once the AI gets its superweapon and doesn’t need to hold back. So even if Paul is conceptually right and fundamental progress proceeds along a nice smooth curve, it might not look to us like a nice smooth curve, because regulations and deceptive AIs could prevent mildly-transformative AI progress from showing up on graphs, but wouldn’t prevent the extreme kind of AI progress that leads to apocalypse. To an outside observer, it would just look like nothing much changed, nothing much changed, nothing much changed, and then suddenly, FOOM. But even aside from this, Eliezer doesn’t think Paul is conceptually right! He thinks that even on the fundamental level, AI progress is going to be discontinuous. It’s like a nuclear bomb. Either you don’t have a nuclear bomb yet, or you do have one and the world is forever transformed. There is a specific moment at which you go from “no nuke” to “nuke” without any kind of “slightly worse nuke” acting as a harbinger. He uses the example of chimps → humans. Evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years evolving brainier and brainier animals (not teleologically, of course, but in practice). For most of those hundreds of millions of years, that meant the animal could have slightly more instincts, or a better memory, or some other change that still stayed within the basic animal paradigm. At the chimp → human transition, we suddenly got tool use, language use, abstract thought, mathematics, swords, guns, nuclear bombs, spaceships, and a bunch of other stuff. The rhesus monkey → chimp transition and the chimp → human transition both involved the same ~quadrupling of neuron number, but the former was pretty boring and the latter unlocked enough new capabilities to easily conquer the world. The GPT-2 → GPT-3 transition involved centupling parameter count. Maybe we will keep centupling parameter count every few years, and most times it will be incremental improvement, and one time it will conquer the world. But even talking about centupling parameter points is giving Paul too much credit. Lots of past inventions didn’t come by quadrupling or centupling something, they came by discovering “the secret sauce”. The Wright brothers (he argues) didn’t make a plane with 4x the wingspan of the last plane that didn’t work, they invented the first plane that could fly at all. The Hiroshima bomb wasn’t some previous bomb but bigger, it was what happened after a lot of scientists spent a long time thinking about a fundamentally different paradigm of bomb-making and brought it to a point where it could work at all. The first transformative AI isn’t going to be GPT-3 with more parameters, it will be what happens after someone discovers how to make machines truly intelligent. (this is the same debate Eliezer had with Ajeya over the Biological Anchors post; have I mentioned that Ajeya and Paul are married?) Fine, Let’s Nitpick The Hell Out Of The Chimps Vs. Humans Example This is where the two of them end up, so let’s follow. Between chimps and humans, there were about seven million years of intermediate steps. These had some human capabilities, but not others. IE homo erectus probably had language, but not mathematics, and in terms of taking over the world it did make it to most of the Old World but was less dominant than moderns. But if we say evolutionary history started 500 million years ago (the Cambrian), and AI history started with the Dartmouth Conference in 1955, then the equivalent of 7 million years of evolutionary history is 1 year of AI history. In the very very unlikely and forced comparison where evolutionary history and AI history go at the same speed, there will be only about a year between chimp-level and human-level AIs. A chimp-level AI probably can’t double GDP, so this would count as a fast takeoff by Paul’s criterion. But even more than that, chimp → human feels like a discontinuity. It’s not just “animals kept getting smarter for hundreds of millions of years, and then ended up very smart indeed”. That happened for a while, and then all of sudden there was a near-instant phase transition into a totally different way of using intelligence with completely new abilities. If AI worked like this, we would have useful toys and interesting specialists for a few decades, until suddenly someone “got it right”, completed the package that was necessary for “true intelligence”, and then we would have a completely new category of thing. Paul admits this analogy is awkward for his position. He answers: Chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation. The task faced by a chimp is largely independent of the abilities that give humans such a huge fitness advantage. It’s not completely independent—the overlap is the only reason that evolution eventually produces humans—but it’s different enough that we should not be surprised if there are simple changes to chimps that would make them much better at designing technology or doing science or accumulating culture […] So I don’t think the example of evolution tells us much about whether the continuous change story applies to intelligence. This case is potentially missing the key element that drives the continuous change story—optimization for performance. Evolution changes continuously on the narrow metric it is optimizing, but can change extremely rapidly on other metrics. For human technology, features of the technology that aren’t being optimized change rapidly all the time. When humans build AI, they will be optimizing for usefulness, and so progress in usefulness is much more likely to be linear. That is, evolution wasn’t optimizing for tool use/language/intelligence, so we got an “overhang” where chimps could potentially have been very good at these, but evolution never bothered “closing the circuit” and turning those capabilities “on”. After a long time, evolution finally blundered into an area where marginal improvements in these capacities improved fitness, so evolution started improving them and it was easy. Imagine a company which, through some oversight, didn’t have a Sales department. They just sat around designing and manufacturing increasingly brilliant products, but not putting any effort into selling them. Then the CEO remembers they need a Sales department, starts one up, and the company goes from moving near zero units to moving millions of units overnight. It would look like the company had “suddenly” developed a “vast increase in capabilities”. But this is only possible when a CEO who is weirdly unconcerned about profit forgets to do obvious profit-increasing things for many years. This is Paul’s counterargument to the chimp analogy. Evolution isn’t directly concerned about various intellectual skills; it only wants them in the unusual cases where they’ll contribute to fitness on the margin. AI companies will be very concerned about various intellectual skills. If there’s a trivial change that can make their product 10x better, they’ll make it. So AI capabilities will grow in a “well-rounded” way, there won’t be any “overhangs”, and there won’t be any opportunities for a sudden overhang-solving phase transition with associated new-capability development like with chimps → humans. Eliezer answers: Chimps are nearly useless because they're not general, and doing anything on the scale of building a nuclear plant requires mastering so many different nonancestral domains that it's no wonder natural selection didn't happen to separately train any single creature across enough different domains that it had evolved to solve every kind of domain-specific problem involved in solving nuclear physics and chemistry and metallurgy and thermics in order to build the first nuclear plant in advance of any old nuclear plants existing. Humans are general enough that the same braintech selected just for chipping flint handaxes and making water-pouches and outwitting other humans, happened to be general enough that it could scale up to solving all the problems of building a nuclear plant - albeit with some added cognitive tech that didn't require new brainware, and so could happen incredibly fast relative to the generation times for evolutionarily optimized brainware. Now, since neither humans nor chimps were optimized to be "useful" (general), and humans just wandered into a sufficiently general part of the space that it cascaded up to wider generality, we should legit expect the curve of generality to look at least somewhat different if we're optimizing for that. Eg, right now people are trying to optimize for generality with AIs like Mu Zero and GPT-3. In both cases we have a weirdly shallow kind of generality. Neither is as smart or as deeply general as a chimp, but they are respectively better than chimps at a wide variety of Atari games, or a wide variety of problems that can be superposed onto generating typical human text. They are, in a sense, more general than a biological organism at a similar stage of cognitive evolution, with much less complex and architected brains, in virtue of having been trained, not just on wider datasets, but on bigger datasets using gradient-descent memorization of shallower patterns, so they can cover those wide domains while being stupider and lacking some deep aspects of architecture. It is not clear to me that we can go from observations like this, to conclude that there is a dominant mainline probability for how the future clearly ought to go and that this dominant mainline is, "Well, before you get human-level depth and generalization of general intelligence, you get something with 95% depth that covers 80% of the domains for 10% of the pragmatic impact". ...or whatever the concept is here, because this whole conversation is, on my own worldview, being conducted in a shallow way relative to the kind of analysis I did in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, where I was like, "here is the historical observation, here is what I think it tells us that puts a lower bound on this input-output curve". Here Eliezer sort of kind of grants Paul’s point that AIs will be optimized for generality in a way chimps aren’t, but points to his previous “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” essay to argue that we should expect a fast takeoff anyway. IEM has a lot of stuff in it, but one key point is that instead of using analogies to predict the course of future AI, we should open that black box and try to actually reason about how it will work, in which case we realize that recursive self-improvement common-sensically has to cause an intelligence explosion. I am sort of okay with this, but I feel like a commitment to avoiding analogies should involve not bringing up the chimp-human analogy further, which Eliezer continues to do, quite a lot. I do feel like Paul succeeded in convincing me that we shouldn’t place too much evidential weight on it. The Wimbledon Of Reference Class Tennis “Reference class tennis” is an old rationalist idiom for people throwing analogies back and forth. “AI will be slow, because it’s an economic transition like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, and those were slow!” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an evolutionary step like chimps → humans, and that was fast!” “No, AI will be slow, because it’s an invention, like the computer, and computers were invented piecemeal and required decades of innovation to be useful.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an invention, like the nuclear bomb, and nuclear bombs went from impossible to city-killing in a single day.” “No, AI will be slow, because it will be surrounded by a shell-like metallic computer case, which makes it like a turtle, and turtles are slow.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s dangerous and powerful, like a tiger, and tigers are fast!” And so on. Comparing things to other things is a time-tested way of speculating about them. But there are so many other things to compare to that you can get whatever result you want. This is the failure mode that the term “reference class tennis” was supposed to point to. Both participants in this debate are very smart and trying their hardest to avoid reference-class tennis, but neither entirely succeeds. Eliezer’s preferred classes are Bitcoin (“there wasn't a cryptocurrency developed a year before Bitcoin using 95% of the ideas which did 10% of the transaction volume”), nukes, humans/chimps, the Wright Brothers, AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines), and AlphaFold (ditto for proteins). Paul’s preferred classes are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, chess engines (which have gotten better along a gradual, well-behaved curve), all sorts of inventions like computers and ships (likewise), and world GDP. Eliezer already listed most of these in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper in 2013, and concluded that the space of possible analogies was contradictory enough that we needed to operate at a higher level. Maybe so, but when someone lobs a reference class tennis ball at you, it’s hard to resist the urge to hit it back. Recursive Self-Improvement This is where I think Eliezer most wants to take the discussion. The idea is: once AI is smarter than humans, it can do a superhuman job of developing new AI. In his Microeconomics paper, he writes about an argument he (semi-hypothetically) had with Ray Kurzweil about Moore’s Law. Kurzweil expected Moore’s Law to continue forever, even after the development of superintelligence. Eliezer objects: Suppose we were dealing with minds running a million times as fast as a human, at which rate they could do a year of internal thinking in thirty-one seconds, such that the total subjective time from the birth of Socrates to the death of Turing would pass in 20.9 hours. Do you still think the best estimate for how long it would take them to produce their next generation of computing hardware would be 1.5 orbits of the Earth around the Sun? That is: the fact that it took 1.5 years for transistor density to double isn’t a natural law. It’s pointing to a law that the amount of resources (most notably intelligence) that civilization focused on the transistor-densifying problem equalled the amount it takes to double it every 1.5 years. If some shock drastically changed available resources (by eg speeding up human minds a million times), this would change the resources involved, and the same laws would predict transistor speed doubling in some shorter amount of time (naively 0.000015 years, although realistically at that scale other inputs would dominate). So when Paul derives clean laws of economics showing that things move along slow growth curves, Eliezer asks: why do you think they would keep doing this when one of the discoveries they make along that curve might be “speeding up intelligence a million times”? (Eliezer actually thinks improvements in the quality of intelligence will dominate improvements in speed - AIs will mostly be smarter, not just faster - but speed is a useful example here and we’ll stick with it) Paul answers: Summary of my response: Before there is AI that is great at self-improvement there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement. Powerful AI can be used to develop better AI (amongst other things). This will lead to runaway growth. This on its own is not an argument for discontinuity: before we have AI that radically accelerates AI development, the slow takeoff argument suggests we will have AI that significantly accelerates AI development (and before that, slightly accelerates development). That is, an AI is just another, faster step in the hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, which corresponds to a further increase in rate but not a discontinuity (or even a discontinuity in rate). The most common argument for recursive self-improvement introducing a new discontinuity seems be: some systems “fizzle out” when they try to design a better AI, generating a few improvements before running out of steam, while others are able to autonomously generate more and more improvements. This is basically the same as the universality argument in a previous section. Eliezer: Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior. Outside of toy models: Over the last 10,000 years we had humans going from mediocre at improving their mental systems to being (barely) able to throw together AI systems, but 10,000 years is the equivalent of an eyeblink in evolutionary time - outside the metaphor, this says, "A month before there is AI that is great at self-improvement, there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement." (Or possibly an hour before, if reality is again more extreme along the Eliezer-Hanson axis than Eliezer. But it makes little difference whether it's an hour or a month, given anything like current setups.) This is just pumping hard again on the intuition that says incremental design changes yield smooth output changes, which (the meta-level of the essay informs us wordlessly) is such a strong default that we are entitled to believe it if we can do a good job of weakening the evidence and arguments against it. And the argument is: Before there are systems great at self-improvement, there will be systems mediocre at self-improvement; implicitly: "before" implies "5 years before" not "5 days before"; implicitly: this will correspond to smooth changes in output between the two regimes even though that is not how continuous feedback loops work. I got a bit confused trying to understand the criticality metaphor here. There’s no equivalent of neutron decay, so any AI that can consistently improve its intelligence is “critical” in some sense. Imagine Elon Musk replaces his brain with a Neuralink computer which - aside from having read-write access - exactly matches his current brain in capabilities. Also he becomes immortal. He secludes himself from the world, studying AI and tinkering with his brain’s algorithms. Does he become a superintelligence? I think under the assumptions Paul and Eliezer are using, eventually maybe. After some amount of time he’ll come across a breakthrough he can use to increase his intelligence. Then, armed with that extra intelligence, he’ll be able to pursue more such breakthroughs. However intelligent the AI you’re scared of is, Musk will get there eventually. How long will it take? A good guess might be “years” - Musk starts out as an ordinary human, and ordinary humans are known to take years to make breakthroughs. Suppose it takes Musk one year to come up with a first breakthrough that raises his IQ 1 point. How long will his second breakthrough take? It might take longer, because he has picked the lowest-hanging fruit, and all the other possible breakthroughs are much harder. Or it might take shorter, because he’s slightly smarter than he was before, and maybe some extra intelligence goes a really long way in AI research. The concept of an intelligence explosion seems to assume the second effect dominates the first. This would match the observation that human researchers, who aren’t getting any smarter over time, continue making new discoveries. That suggests the range of possible discoveries at a given intelligence level is pretty vast. Some research finds that the usual pattern in science is constant rate of discovery from exponentially increasing number of researchers, suggesting strong low-hanging fruit effects, but these seem to be overwhelmed by other considerations in AI right now. I think Eliezer’s position on this subject is shaped by assumptions like: If you have an AI as intelligent as Elon Musk today, then tomorrow you can run it on more hardware with a bit of normal human algorithmic progress, and get one twice as intelligent. So even if it would take Elon years to make a breakthrough, long before those years are up you’ll have an AI that can make breakthroughs much faster.
Inline links: thirty years away, Biological Anchors, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, Some research finds
They ended up focusing on a world where hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars are invested in AI (for context, this is about the value of the whole tech industry today). Partly this is because Paul thinks this sounds “pretty crazy” - it must mean that AI progress is exciting enough to attract lots of investors. But partly it’s because Eliezer keeps bringing up apparent examples of discontinuous progress - like AlphaGo - and Paul keeps dismissing them as “there wasn’t enough interest in AI to fill in the gaps that would have made that progress continuous”. If AI gets trillions in funding, he expects to see a lot fewer AlphaGos. Eliezer is mildly skeptical this world will happen, because he expects regulatory barriers to make it harder to deploy AI killer apps. But it doesn’t seem to be the crux of their disagreement.
The impact of GPT-3 had nothing whatsoever to do with its perplexity on Penn Treebank . . . the impact of GPT-3 was in establishing that trendlines did continue in a way that shocked pretty much everyone who'd written off 'naive' scaling strategies. Progress is made out of stacked sigmoids: if the next sigmoid doesn't show up, progress doesn't happen. Trends happen, until they stop. Trendlines are not caused by the laws of physics. You can dismiss AlphaGo by saying "oh, that just continues the trendline in ELO I just drew based on MCTS bots", but the fact remains that MCTS progress had stagnated, and here we are in 2021, and pure MCTS approaches do not approach human champions, much less beat them. Appealing to trendlines is roughly as informative as "calories in calories out"; 'the trend continued because the trend continued'. A new sigmoid being discovered is extremely important.
Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 11, 2022 · Original source
Prosaic alignment is hard… “Prosaic alignment” (see this article for more) means alignment of normal AIs like the ones we use today. For a while, people thought those AIs couldn’t reach dangerous levels, and that AIs that reached dangerous levels would have so many exotic new discoveries that we couldn’t even begin to speculate on what they would be like or how to align them. After GPT-2, DALL-E, and the rest, alignment researchers got more concerned that AIs kind of like current models could be dangerous. Prosaic alignment - trying to align AIs like the ones we have now - has become the dominant (though not unchallenged) paradigm in alignment research. “Prosaic” doesn’t necessarily mean the AI cannot write poetry; see Gwern’s AI generated poetry for examples. … because OOD behavior is unpredictable “OOD” stands for “out of distribution”. All AIs are trained in a certain environment. Then they get deployed in some other environment. If it’s like the training environment, presumably their training is pretty relevant and helpful. If it’s not like the training environment, anything can happen. Returning to our stock example, the “training environment” where evolution designed humans didn’t involve contraceptives. In that environment, the base optimizer’s goal (pass on genes) and the mesa-optimizer’s goal (get genital friction) were very well-aligned - doing one often led to the other - so there wasn’t much pressure on evolution to look for a better proxy. Then 1957, boom, the FDA approves the oral contraceptive pill, and suddenly the deployment environment looks really really different from the training environment and the proxy collapses so humiliatingly that people start doing crazy things like electing Viktor Orban prime minister. So: suppose we train a robot to pick strawberries. We let it flail around in a strawberry patch, and reinforce it whenever strawberries end up in a bucket. Eventually it learns to pick strawberries very well indeed. But maybe all the training was done on a sunny day. And maybe what it actually learned was to identify the metal bucket by the way it gleamed in the sunlight. Later we ask it to pick strawberries in the evening, where a local streetlight is the brightest thing around, and it throws the strawberries at the streetlight instead. So fine. We train it in a variety of different lighting conditions, until we’re sure that, no matter what the lighting situation, the strawberries go in the bucket. Then one day someone with a big bulbous red nose wanders on to the field, and the robot tears his nose off and pulls it into the bucket. If only there had been someone with a nose that big and red in the training distribution, so we could have told it not to do that! The point is, just because it’s learned “strawberries into bucket” in one environment, doesn’t mean it’s safe or effective in another. And we can never be sure we’ve caught all the ways the environment can vary. …and deception is more dangerous than Goodharting. To “Goodhart” is to take advantage of Goodhart’s Law: to follow the letter of your reward function, rather than the spirit. The ordinary-life equivalent is “teaching to the test”. The system’s programmers (eg the Department of Education) have an objective (children should learn). They delegate that objective to mesa-optimizers (the teachers) via a proxy objective (children should do well on the standardized test) and a correlated reward function (teachers get paid more if their students get higher test scores). The teachers can either pursue the base objective for less reward (teach children useful skills), or pursue their mesa-level objective for more reward (teach them how to do well on the test). An alignment failure! This sucks, but it’s a bounded problem. We already know that some teachers teach to the test, and the Department of Education has accepted this as a reasonable cost of having the incentive system at all. We might imagine our strawberry-picker cutting strawberries into little pieces, so that it counts as having picked more strawberries. Again, it sucks, but once a programmer notices it can be fixed pretty quickly (as long as the AI is still weak and under control). What about deception? Suppose the strawberry-picker happens to land on some goal function other than the intended one. Maybe, as before, it wants to toss strawberries at light sources, in a way that works when the nearest light source is a metal bucket, but fails when it’s a streetlight. Our programmers are (somewhat) smart and careful, so during training, they test it at night, next to a streetlight. What happens? If it’s just a dumb collection of reflexes trained by gradient descent, it throws the strawberry at the streetlight and this is easily caught and fixed. If it’s a very smart mesa-optimizer, it might think “If I throw the strawberry at the streetlight, I will be caught and trained to have different goals. This totally fails to achieve my goal of having strawberries near light sources. So throwing the strawberry at the light source this time, in the training environment, fails to achieve my overall goal of having strawberries thrown at light sources in general. I’ll do what the humans want - put the strawberry in the bucket - for now.” So it puts the strawberry in the bucket and doesn’t get caught. Then, as soon as the humans stop looking, it throws strawberries at the streetlight again. Deception is more dangerous than Goodharting because Goodharting will get caught and trained away, and deception might not. I might not be explaining this well, see also Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers? It’s More Likely Than You Think: We prevent OOD behavior by detecting OOD and obtaining more human labels when we detect it… If you’re (somewhat) careful, you can run your strawberry-picking AI at night, see it throw strawberries at streetlights, and train it out of this behavior (ie have a human programmer label it “bad” so the AI gradient-descends away from it) …and we eliminate the incentive for deception by ensuring that the base optimizer is myopic A myopic optimizer is one that reinforces programs based only on their performance within a short time horizon. So for example, the outside gradient descent loop might grade a strawberry picker only on how well it did picking strawberries for the first hour it was deployed. If this worked perfectly, it would create an optimizer with a short time horizon. When it considered deceiving its programmers in order to get a payoff a few days later when they stopped watching it, it wouldn’t bother, since a few days later is outside the time horizon. …and implements a decision theory incapable of acausal trade. You don’t want to know about this one, really. Just pretend it never mentioned this, sorry for the inconvenience. There are deceptively-aligned non-myopic mesa-optimizers even for a myopic base objective. Even if the base optimizer is myopic, the mesa-optimizer might not be. Evolution designed humans myopically, in the sense that we live some number of years, and nothing that happens after that can reward or punish us further. But we still “build for posterity” anyway, presumably as a spandrel of having working planning software at all. Infinite optimization power might be able to evolve this out of us, but infinite optimization power could do lots of stuff, and real evolution remains stubbornly finite. Maybe it would be helpful if we could make the mesa-optimizer itself myopic (though this would severely limit its utility). But so far there is no way to make a mesa-optimizer anything. You just run the gradient descent and cross your fingers. The most likely outcome: you run myopic gradient descent to create a strawberry picker. It creates a mesa-optimizer with some kind of proxy goal which corresponds very well to strawberry picking in the training optimization, like flinging red things at lights (realistically it will be weirder and more exotic than this). The mesa-optimizer is not incentivized to think about anything more than an hour out, but does so anyway, for the same reason I’m not incentivized to speculate about the far future but I’m doing so anyway. While speculating about the far future, it realizes that failing to pick strawberries correctly now will thwart its goal of throwing red things at light sources later. It picks strawberries correctly in the training distribution, and then, when training is over and nobody is watching, throws strawberries at streetlights. (Then it realizes it could throw lots more red things at light sources if it was more powerful, achieves superintelligence somehow, and converts the mass of the Earth into red things it can throw at the sun. The end.) III. You’re still here? But we already finished explaining the meme! Okay, fine. Is any of this relevant to the real world? As far as we know, there are no existing full mesa-optimizers. AlphaGo is kind of a mesa-optimizer. You could approximate it as a gradient descent loop creating a good-Go-move optimizer. But this would only be an approximation: DeepMind hard-coded some parts of AlphaGo, then gradient-descended other parts. Its objective function is “win games of Go”, which is hard-coded and pretty clear. Whether or not you choose to call it a mesa-optimizer, it’s not a very scary one. Will we get scary mesa-optimizers in the future? This ties into one of the longest-running debates in AI alignment - see eg my review of Reframing Superintelligence, or the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Ngo dialogue. Optimists say: “Since a goal-seeking AI might kill everyone, I would simply not create one”. They speculate about mechanical/instinctual superintelligences that would be comparatively easy to align, and might help us figure out how to deal with their scarier cousins. But the mesa-optimizer literature argues: we have limited to no control over what kind of AIs we get. We can hope and pray for mechanical instinctual AIs all we want. We can avoid specifically designing goal-seeking AIs. But really, all we’re doing here is setting up a gradient descent loop and pressing ‘go’. Then the loop evolves whatever kind of AI best minimizes our loss function. Will that be a mesa-optimizer? Well, I benefit from considering my actions and then choosing the one that best achieves my goal. Do you benefit from this? It sure does seem like this helps in a broad class of situations. So it would be surprising if planning agents weren’t an effective AI design. And if they are, we should expect gradient descent to stumble across them eventually. This is the scenario that a lot of AI alignment research focuses on. When we create the first true planning agent - on purpose or by accident - the process will probably start with us running a gradient descent loop with some objective function. That will produce a mesa-optimizer with some other, potentially different, objective function. Making sure you actually like the objective function that you gave the original gradient descent loop on purpose is called outer alignment. Carrying that objective function over to the mesa-optimizer you actually get is called inner alignment. Outer alignment problems tend to sound like Sorcerer’s Apprentice. We tell the AI to pick strawberries, but we forgot to include caveats and stop signals. The AI becomes superintelligent and converts the whole world into strawberries so it can pick as many as possible. Inner alignment problems tend to sound like the AI tiling the universe with some crazy thing which, to humans, might not look like picking strawberries at all, even though in the AI’s exotic ontology it served as some useful proxy for strawberries in the training distribution. My stand-in for this is “converts the whole world into red things and throws them into the sun”, but whatever the AI that kills us really does will probably be weirder than that. They’re not ironic Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style comeuppance. They’re just “what?” If you wrote a book about a wizard who created a strawberry-picking golem, and it converted the entire earth into ferrous microspheres and hurled them into the sun, it wouldn’t become iconic the way Sorcerer’s Apprentice did. Inner alignment problems happen “first”, so we won’t even make it to the good-story outer alignment kind unless we solve a lot of issues we don’t currently know how to solve. For more information, you can read: Rob Miles’ video above, direct link here, channel here.
Inline links: this article, Gwern’s AI generated poetry, electing Viktor Orban prime minister, Goodhart’s Law, Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers? It’s More Likely Than You Think, my review of, Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Ngo dialogue, here, here
The New AI Consciousness Paper
November 20, 2025 · Original source
But some AIs do use recurrence. AlphaGo had a little recurrence in its tree search. This level of simple feedback might not qualify. But MaMBA, a would-be-LLM-killer architecture from 2023, likely does. In fact, for every theory of consciousness they discuss, the authors are able to find some existing or plausible-near-future architecture which satisfies its requirements.
Andreessen Horowitz5 mentions across 5 issues

Andreessen Horowitz is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between October 10, 2024 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Marc Andreesen and his Andreesen Horowitz (“A16Z”) venture capital firm"; "startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture fund behind a scorched-earth smear campaign"; "Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16Z, a famous Bay Area VC firm)". It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, OpenAI, A16Z.

Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
October 10, 2024
Last seen
January 13, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
Nowhere in Fortune or these congressional statements was it mentioned that Li founded a billion-dollar AI startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture fund behind a scorched-earth smear campaign against the bill.
Inline links: backed by, smear campaign
The other opponent everyone talks about is Marc Andreesen and his Andreesen Horowitz (“A16Z”) venture capital firm. Their campaign was especially public-facing, confrontational, and dishonest, and got most of the Twitter buzz. But in the end they were only one of several major players, and maybe not the one with the most political clout.
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
20: Claim: since their 2010 fund, at least until our last data source in 2018, Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16Z, a famous Bay Area VC firm) has overall underperformed the S&P500.
Inline links: Claim, underperformed
This is especially surprising because A16Z is famous for going all in on crypto early. But during the 2015 - 2018 period, Bitcoin - the absolute dumbest and most obvious crypto bet - went up 2,000%. So how is performance this bad even possible? The Twitter thread speculates that just as Uber used to happily lose money on every ride in order to gain market share, A16Z is happily losing money on every investment in order to gain VC market share. But ride-sharing is a natural monopoly; how will A16Z prevent competitors from entering venture capital? And why should people give it any market share at all if it can’t make them money? Maybe their pitch could be that you’ll make less money, but it will be uncorrelated with the regular stock market? But is that true? Aren’t tech startups pretty cyclical? Also, I wonder if this was framed to their LPs as “yeah we’ll definitely lose your money for the first ten years, but eventually it’ll all work out”. They must be the most trusting people in the world.
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega the last: “Alpha and omega” is an implicit claim to span all things, similar to the English phrase “from A to Z”. Marc Andreessen’s company, Andreessen Horowitz, is more commonly called A16Z - superficially a reference to its first and last letters, but also making the same implicit claim. Just as Ursula von der Leyen is a leader in AI regulation, Marc Andreessen is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, having recently founded a $100 million anti-AI-safety SuperPAC. If the fight for AI alignment is Revelation’s final fight of Good vs. Evil, then John was correct to name him as the leader of the evil side. During my original lecture, an audience member objected that Andreessen holds stakes in several other AI companies, but not Anthropic. In what sense, then, can he be said to be giving power to the Beast? This might be a reference to his general anti-AI safety lobbying activities. In 16:13, “three unclean spirits like frogs” emanate from the mouth of the Antichrist and his allies, which muster the kings of the world to the side of evil. I think this is a good match for Andreessen packing the Trump administration with lieutenants charged with turning the government against AI safety, and I tentatively identify the three spirits as David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, and Michael Kratsios. They are “like frogs” in that they act like MAGA populists, who use the frog as their symbol. Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)
Inline links: A16Z, is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FhC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2e5e8be9-ed2d-4f51-855c-f55deac58c02_976x850.jpeg
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
January 13, 2026 · Original source
“And that’s the beauty of social selection! You don’t have to like it. My backers at Andreessen Horowitz told me, and I quote, that ‘This is the most exciting product we’ve seen since Cannabets, the combination marijuana delivery and digital casino app that lets you fund your pot orders by gambling on how long it takes you to get addicted.’ And the more often you disagree with me, the more likely I am to go to parties with them instead of you.”
Apple5 mentions across 5 issues

Apple is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 25, 2021 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "on the ... Apple stores"; ""Apple exists, and sells Macintosh desktop computers""; "big tech company (eg Google/Apple/Meta)". It most often appears alongside Google, US, California.

Article page
Apple
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
May 25, 2021
Last seen
May 07, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Peer Review Request: Depression
May 25, 2021 · Original source
Intellicare is a series of CBT apps; you can download it for free as “Intellicare Hub” here or on the Google or Apple stores. I have never tried it, but the Carlat Report says nice things about it, and it has several successful studies under its belt.
Inline links: here, several successful studies
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
That's the part Scott and so many others miss. It isn't "lone genius has a clever idea, hires a bunch of people to Make It So under his management, and collects his billions". It's an iterative process, with each step increasing revenues, increasing costs, and increasing benefits. The no-billionaires version means SpaceX exists, but it never built anything bigger than the Falcon 5. Tesla exists, and produces a few thousand Roadsters a year. Amazon exists, and sells books. Apple exists, and sells Macintosh desktop computers.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
Some big macroeconomic indicator (eg GDP, unemployment, inflation) shows a visible bump or dip as a direct effect of AI (“direct effect” excludes eg an AI-designed pandemic killing people) : 15% LIMITS OF SCALING: In theory, GPT-4 will bump up against some fundamental limits of scaling (eg it will use all text ever written as efficiently as possible in its training corpus). I've heard various claims about easy ways to get around this, which will probably work; I expect scaling to continue to produce gains, but this is less obvious than it's been the past five years. Training GPT-4 will cost $100M, which is a lot. Apple spends $20 billion per year on R&D, so it's not like tech companies can't spend more money if they want to, but after the next two OOMs it will start being bet-the-company money even for large actors. I still think it will probably happen, but all of these things might be hiccups that slow things down a little, maybe? The leading big tech company (eg Google/Apple/Meta) is (clearly ahead of/approximately caught up to/clearly still behind) the leading AI-only company (DeepMind/OpenAI/Anthropic) in the quality of their AI products: (25%/50%/25%)
The leading big tech company (eg Google/Apple/Meta) is (clearly ahead of/approximately caught up to/clearly still behind) the leading AI-only company (DeepMind/OpenAI/Anthropic) in the quality of their AI products: (25%/50%/25%)
Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices
May 10, 2023 · Original source
Makeshift housing in a North Dakota oil boom town (source) If each person creates half a job, the original 1,000 oilmen attract 500 service workers, those 500 attract another 250, and so on until population stabilizes at 2,000 people. In this model, if there are fewer than 2,000 houses in the town, demand exceeds supply (no matter what is going on in the rest of the country), but if there are more than 2,000, supply exceeds demand. So if we imagine Google’s presence as an oil-like resource, the extra demand for housing in the Bay should gradually decline: at some point, you will have finished housing the Google workers and the service workers who support them. But this isn’t right either, because Google isn’t a natural resource - it’s a company founded by Bay Area residents. If you got more Bay Area residents, you would (with some delay) get more Googles. Or: Austin gets lots of jobs from Tesla. Tesla wasn’t founded by Austinites. But it moved to Austin when it became a known “tech hub”, ie a place with lots of tech companies and tech employees. It wouldn’t have moved to Austin if Austin was still an uninhabited plain or a one-horse town. So as Austin got bigger, it attracted more tech companies. So in both the Bay Area case and the Austin case, having more people attracted more tech companies, either because the residents themselves found the company or because the company gets attracted to this newly bustling city. Potential counterargument: Each new Bay Area resident gives the Bay another lottery ticket to found the next Google. If having the first Google gets it an extra 1 million people, but there are 300 million people in the US, then those extra 1 million only give it a 1/300 chance of winning the next lottery. So even though the Bay Area won the lottery once, and this made it have high demand, this doesn’t mean the high demand will cause it to win more lotteries. If you win the lottery once, spend all your winnings on more lottery tickets, and keep doing this forever, you haven’t invented an infinite money printing machine, eventually you’ll just lose. Potential counter-counter-argument: the Bay got Google, and Facebook, and Apple, and . . . so these can’t all be separate lotteries. I think you should probably model it as a high-level lottery to become the next hub of a tech-sized industry, plus many low-level lotteries where once you’re the tech hub, you’re attracting lots of techies, and each techie gives you a ticket in a lottery where the denominator is the number of techies to found the next big tech company. And the Bay might have half the US’s techie population. So maybe here there is a self-sustaining lottery-winning cycle, at least until tech plays itself out and nobody wants any more tech companies. And that might take a long time. Tom (author of Tom Thought) writes: The primary drivers of demand for living in NYC are the specific opportunities available in NYC. It is true that on long time horizons, one of the reasons these opportunities have tended to collect in NYC is that it is a dense place. But those aren't the only reasons - NYC is much more important than other, bigger cities in other parts of the world for complex historical reasons. Even if a catastrophe were to wipe out half the city, there would still be a great deal of demand to live near important institutions like Broadway, Wall Street, Port of NY & NJ, Columbia, etc (assuming those institutions survived the catastrophe). Increasing the number of housing units has a very mechanical impact on how many people can live in the place. But it has only a second-order impact on the types of institutions that drive demand to live in the city. People don't just generically crave to live near other people for the most part (a handful of urbanist freaks like myself excepted). The Bay Area is a great example of this. It is much less populated than other much cheaper cities. Density isn't why people want to live there - it's access to a specific culture and specific institutions. Demand for that is not simply a function of density - some people want to be part of Bay Area culture and others don't. Adding more units will induce some demand as a second-order effect, but will bring prices down as a first-order effect. To relate this to your model: we might be able to say that the country has a certain number of abstract "culture points" that have been allocated to different cities by various historical forces. Each culture point a city has increases demand to live in that city by a certain amount. Adding more people to the city may allow it to generate additional culture points over time, or acquire culture points from other cities, but this doesn't happen right away, and is determined by a host of factors other than just density. Under this model, we expect a place like NYC to always cost much more than North Dakota (since NYC possesses a large number of culture points), but we would also expect that adding additional housing units to NYC would bring costs down (since there are now additional housing units per culture point). Perhaps this process will over time allow NYC to steal away some culture points from Chicago, Boston, or other cities, but this is a secondary effect. This just seems to be passing the buck. Yes, people move to New York because it has Broadway, Columbia University, and Wall Street. Why does it have those things? Because one in every X New York citizens founds a good artistic/educations/financial institution, and New York has a large population of employees to work at those institutions and customers to patronize those institutions. If Conanicut Island had a population of 10 million people instead of Manhattan, there would be lots of great institutions on Conanicut and it would have more culture points. I don’t think it’s a culture-point game and population/density just sort of occasionally redistributes culture points, I think to a first approximation culture points just track population/density. Maybe they track the population/density of upper class people better than the total population/density, but I don’t think this is a big enough distinction to sink the argument. 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities Some people brought these up as a good natural experiment: the Chinese really did try building millions of houses on their equivalent of a North Dakota plain. What happened? Jeremiah Johnson (author of Infinite Scroll) writes: You currently seem like you're at the stage of understanding the thought experiments pretty well, but not understanding them on a DEEP level. For example with your hypothetical, this has actually happened before! Kind of. China built a bunch of 'ghost cities' basically out of nothing, and while there was an initial craze of speculation and tons of investment and building... nobody went to live in those cities most of the time. And now they're deeply distressed assets worth basically nothing. When nobody actually lives in the ghost city, it doesn't matter that they have super dense housing. There's no demand. (the only reason they might be worth something is that the CCP very, very much does not want to pop their huge housing bubble and is likely to bail out some of the parties involved) Parmenides (author of Last House On The Left) writes: I think your mixing up the agglomeration effects of density, which is what induces the demand, and the housing supply. You can't just build a city and expect people to move in, China has tried that. But if you have the agglomeration effects of density and shortage of housing due to artificial constraints, which we have all across the US, then you get dense areas with high housing costs. sdwr writes: Think of China's ghost cities / apartment blocks. Prices surely can't be that high there. Maybe the answer is that developers are good at their job, and build supply where theres demand for it? But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China: Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities". Ash Lael writes: I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing. I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like. See also Bloomberg: China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets. This wasn’t trivial. It looks like the Chinese government had to put in some work to make people move in, including opening good schools and universities there. Probably if they had just built apartments in the middle of the desert and nothing else, they would have stayed empty. But that’s even more of a reductio ad absurdum than the original ghost city plan. Kangbashi, China’s most famous ghost city. What are housing prices like in the ghost city? Again from Bloomberg: Sitting on the southern outskirts of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City (population 2.2 million), Kangbashi was the archetypal ghost city 10 years ago, with barren boulevards and empty buildings standing forlornly in the desert. Local officials are adamant that things have changed. They say 91% of homes in the district are occupied. In fact, after a yearslong construction freeze, the government approved six housing projects in 2020 and expects 3,000 homes to be built by the end of this year. Apartments in a new development are selling for 9,500 yuan per square meter, and downtown they go for 15,000 to 16,000 yuan, according to Liu Yueyue, 28, a salesman at a new residential development in the district’s northeast. “Would houses in a ghost town sell at such high prices?” asks Liu. Half of his customers come from outside Kangbashi, and most are parents who want to send their children to the well-regarded local schools, he says. Looking at this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Kangbashi seems squarely in the middle - for example, Wuhan and Xian are also in the 15,000 - 16,000 range. I claim this supports my argument: surely twenty years ago, houses in this particular deserted corner of Inner Mongolia would have been dirt cheap (if any even existed). But if you build a city there, it becomes just as expensive as any other city! Here it’s very obvious that the density caused the high prices instead of the other way around. Still, the Chinese housing market is weird, with significant vacancies even in expensive, well-developed cities. Paul Botts: No official vacancy rates are published in China and no specific definition of it exists there. Various think tanks and researchers both within that country and elsewhere have published estimates ranging from as low as 11 percent to as high as 24 percent. Those estimates have been for varying samples of Chinese cities, have used various definitions of housing vacancy rate, etc. The best (as in most systematic) estimate yet produced has come from researchers at a university in Liaoning. They used night-time urban lightsheds captured by a new (2018 launch) Chinese satellite having a new level of light sensing technology which allows separating out light from parks and plazas. They covered a large sample (49 cities), and made their sample representative of city type, city size, regions within China, etc. They also crossed-referenced with local housing data to ensure accurate balancing of their sample and to confirm that the satellite was successfully identifying light coming from housing blocks. They found vacancy rates of just under 20 percent in China's Tier 1 cities, and found rates above 20 percent in 40 of the 49 cities. They found the highest vacancy rates in western and northeastern cities, which are also the newest ones; that finding is consistent with the hypothesis of significant numbers of recently-built ghost cities. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data And Phil H (author of the blog Tang Poetry) writes: The price of housing in China has skyrocketed over the past few decades, as all those extra apartments have been built. I live in a pleasant but unremarkable southern city, and I paid London prices (about 4.5m yuan/$650k for a 1,300 sq ft flat). That seems to match Scott's hypothesis that high density leads to high prices. House prices here have risen much faster than incomes. They've risen in rural areas, too, but the increases in price in cities have been stratospheric. 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn’t Think Tokyo Was Relevant I won’t name and shame people, but for example: You excluded Tokyo from your dataset. Tokyo has much higher density than SF and much lower price per sqft. Tokyo just kills this. Tokyo is bigger than New York and has significantly lower rent because they build more housing! This is in a wealthy country with even lower interest rates than the US. I don't think you have justified excluding non-US metros, like Tokyo, or Auckland. Doesn't this lead to the natural conclusion that there is a sufficient level of housing to build, and that the problem is that the USA's many metros are structured to prevent housing? It seems like you're just arguing that US metros are bad at building housing, which is also what Matt Yglesias is arguing. "Change my mind about housing, but don't mention Tokyo" is like saying "Change my mind about gun possession, but don't mention Switzerland." You can't test the effect of allowing new housing unless you're willing to look at cities that do, in fact, allow it. Tokyo and NYC both attract tons of new residents But Tokyo's housing rents have been stable, while NYC rents keep rising. Why? Tokyo has permissive housing construction laws. NYC makes building new housing almost illegal. Yes, dense cities are attractive, and that makes them get more dense over time. But it only makes them more expensive if you forbid new housing to keep up with the new residents. Tokyo! But I’m like the 10th person to bring it up… As I wrote on the original post (not even edited in! it’s been there the whole time!): I worry someone will bring up Tokyo as a counterexample. But I think Tokyo managed to build its way to low housing prices in the context of the rest of Japan also having good housing policy. Even if that isn’t true, Tokyo on its own is a quarter of the Japanese market, so it might be able to exhaust the entire pool of Japanese house-seekers by itself! That is, yes, you’re all correct that cities are only expensive in the context of more demand for city housing than the (NIMBY-constrained) city housing market can currently supply. You are all correct that if this problem were solved at the national level, then city housing would be cheap, and every additional city house would make it cheaper. My claim is that marginal changes - like Oakland building an extra 10,000 units, but everyone else staying the same - will most likely increase Oakland prices. Yes, if Oakland unilaterally built 50 million units, that would soak up the entire excess demand and probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). Yes, if the entire US switched to good housing policy at the same time, that would probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). But if we don’t do any of that stuff, and just build another 10,000 houses in Oakland, I think it would probably increase prices in Oakland. Some other people brought up that Japan has a declining population, and it’s much easier to have low house prices when your population is declining (compared to some previous time when number of houses presumably matched number of people), but ddd pointed out that people continue to migrate from the Japanese countryside to Tokyo, so its population continues to increase. Also, Mike (I’m stitching together two comments here): In a country with a declining population, you would expect that fewer homes are being built per capita because there's little to no competition for existing homes. But it's exactly the opposite! Japan builds far more homes per capita than the US does, despite their declining population […] As a result, the average Japanese home is very new and the average house is torn down and replaced after a relatively short 30 years. They're living in nice new homes for cheaper. 5. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Understanding Economics Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I think you're making a very common mistake here of confusing supply/demand with *quantity* supplied or quantity demanded. (This is very common! we teach students about this in micro 101 because it's so easy to make!) What you're seeing is that the quantity supplied is correlated with housing prices (true!). But this is very different from establishing that the supply curve--i.e. the amount of housing that would be produced at any given price, and what moves up/down when we regulate/deregulate supply--is positively correlated with price. Figuring out what supply curves look like is a lot less intuitive and requires some high-grade econometrics, which is why economists had to set up a whole commission just to study this particular problem (the Cowles Commission). In terms of resources for understanding how these concepts are different, a micro 101 textbook will cover this distinction. For the econometrics side of this, I've heard good things about Scott Cunningham's *Causal Inference Mixtape*, although I haven't personally used it. My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability. MLE later gets more on point: The effect you're discussing here is kind of real in a sense. When the marginal utility of housing increases for *other* people, density arguably becomes more desirable for me, which is kind of like the demand curve shifting up. These are called bandwagon goods and discussed here: http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf In theory, the bandwagon effect could be so strong that parts of the demand curve are upward-sloping. Solutions like this are not, technically, prohibited by the laws of mathematics, just the laws of economics. (And arguably of physics--see paper for conditions where these kinds of bandwagon effects imply the amount of housing in the city would have to be negative). In practice, this effect exists but just can't overcome the normal, non-weird economics that says "making more of a good makes the prices fall." Again, I claim the existence of Manhattan vs. Conanicut shows that sometimes it does. I cannot find the words “housing”, “real estate”, or “land value” anywhere in that paper. Alex Poterack writes: There's two things going on here: confusing shifts in demand with movement along the demand curve, and getting causation backwards. You're assuming density causes prosperity, rather than prosperity causing density. There are ways the former can happen, but the bigger thing is that, for a wide range of historical reasons, you can make a lot of money in NYC and SF, so lots of people want to live there, so they get very dense. This is the prosperity shifting demand right, so at any given price, more people want to live there; this drives prices up, and they go higher the more fixed supply is. If you built a bunch of housing in Oakland, lots of people would move there because it's cheaper, which is movement along the demand curve; it's still the same number of people who want to live there at any price. Now, it's possible that the increased number of people living there makes the city more prosperous (this is the phenomenon of induced demand), which would shift demand right, but there are way more differences between NYC/SF and Oakland than just the density, so I don't think it would shift demand enough to offset this. In particular, if it's just a small increase in small, it's also a small increase in density, so there's almost no shift in demand (but there is movement along the curve). I still think this is missing my point, but I present it here in case anyone else is enlightened by it and wants to try further to convince me I’m making this mistake. 6. Comments By Famous People Who Potentially Have Good Opinions Scott Sumner is an economist and blogger; he writes: It is certainly the case that building more housing can make a city more desirable, and that this effect could be so strong that it overwhelms the price depressing impact of a greater quantity supplied. But studies suggest that this is not generally the case. Texas provides a nice case study. Among Texas’s big metro areas, Austin has the tightest restrictions on building and Houston is the most willing to allow dense infill development. Even though Houston is the larger city, house prices are far higher in Austin: Houston pretty much describes the “Oakland with more housing” outcome that Alexander views as somewhat far-fetched. Only in this case, it’s Austin with more housing. Alexander seems too quick to accept the, “If you build it they will come” idea—that you can build more housing and thereby boost demand so much that prices actually rise. I started the post with a graph of about 50 cities, showing a positive correlation between density and price. I’m having trouble seeing how Sumner’s point isn’t just “if you remove 48 of those cities and cherry-pick two, the relationship is negative”. My attempt to place Austin and Houston on the original graph, using Sumner’s data plus a few other things available online. Why weren’t they on there already? Maybe because the graph is metro areas and Sumner was talking about Austin and Houston as cities, but I’m not sure and agree this is confusing. Everyone knows Austin is more expensive than Houston because Austin is a trendy tech and culture hub and Houston isn’t (and relatedly, because Austin’s median family income is 50% higher than Houston’s). Unless someone wants to claim that its failure to build housing helped turn it into a trendy tech and culture hub, I don’t think there’s much point to this comparison. It’s true that Houston’s bigger size didn’t let it leapfrog over Austin to become a trendy tech and culture hub, which goes against some of what I claimed in the first part of this post. But I never claimed there would be a perfect 1-1 correlation between city size and trendiness, or that you could never find a pair of cities where one was bigger but the other was more trendy. Just that there would be a correlation. Moving on: Here’s the problem with this argument. It mixes up population change due to economic effects such as the benefits of agglomeration, with population changes due to regulatory changes such as less strict zoning. If you look at things this way, then the stylized facts work against Alexander’s argument. Over the past 50 years, increasingly strict zoning has reduced housing construction on big cities like New York and San Francisco. As a result, their populations have increased by less than in cities with less strict zoning, such as Houston. If Alexander were correct, then the price gap between the tightly controlled cities on the coast and the more laissez-faire cities of Middle America should have shrunk over time. Instead, the price gap has widened. New York and San Francisco were always more expensive than other cites, but with tighter zoning and less new construction the gap has become far wider. During the last fifty years, there was also deindustrialization and demographic sorting. This is just the Austin vs. Houston story all over again. Alexander is implicitly viewing this outcome as a “problem” for the city that builds more housing. They must sacrifice so that the rest of the country can gain. But in his scenario, Oakland is better off. Indeed if it were not better off, then why would more people choose to live in Oakland? In order for it to be true that building more housing boosts housing prices, it must also be true that the quality of existing houses (including neighborhood effects) rises by more than enough to offset the increase in supply. That means the new housing construction must make Oakland such a desirable place to live that the amenity effect overwhelms the quantity effect [...] Of course, economic change always has winners and losers. Here’s how I would describe the impact of allowing more housing construction in Oakland, in the unlikely event that this did raise housing prices: 1. America would benefit. 2. Oakland would benefit. 3. Poor people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 4. Affluent people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 5. Homeowners in Oakland would benefit. 6. Some renters in Oakland would benefit (from a more economically dynamic city.) 7. Some renters in Oakland would suffer from higher rents. In the much more likely case where new housing construction would lower prices, the impact described in #5 and #7 might reverse. Either way, there is no defensible argument for not building more housing in Oakland, regardless of the impact on price. If building more housing reduces its price, then there is a strong argument for allowing more housing construction. If building more housing raises its price, then the argument for more construction is even stronger. I agree with all this. Jeremiah Johnson is a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, host of the Neoliberal Podcast, and a YIMBY activist (not to be confused with Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, who killed 300 Native Americans and ate their livers). He writes: Here's why you're wrong in a single sentence: Demand causes high prices, not new units. Prices are high in SF and NYC because those are desirable places to live for a huge number of people. People all over the country and the world would live there if they could, and prices reflect that. The fact that the densest cities are the most expensive is true. But the high prices are not caused by density - rather, the density and the high prices are both a consequence of crushingly high demand […] There's a feedback loop, but what matters here is the elasticity, which is less than one. We can measure this empirically. New housing lowers prices via the mechanism of adding supply, which is basic economics and how we expect markets to work. New housing could raise prices if it also made the city a more desirable place to live and shifted people's preferences, such that there was more demand to live there after the new housing is built. If you think it's unclear which of these effects would dominate, luckily we have empirical data that over and over and over shows adding housing supply does indeed lower prices on a local level. This is a fairly well established result that replicates well. edit: I'm actually thinking about drawing out the weighted DAG graphs here to make the conceptual stuff easier, but it would be pretty long. I'd love to do this as a guest post. I’m skeptical of the empirical results because they don’t match the much stronger “Manhattan vs. Conanicut island” empirical results, and if I try to think about why, the best explanation I can think of is that the Manhattan experiment has been going on longer (ie long enough for Manhattan’s extra residents to found businesses and institutions that attract new people). I’ve told him he can try pitching this guest post to me; in either case, I would be interested in seeing the graphs. Several other people also posted this graph that Johnson helped make famous: Hopefully by now you can predict my objection: the places in the southeast corner are mostly unfashionable red state Sun Belt cities; the places in the northwest corner are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities. My conclusion is that trendy liberal coastal cities are both more NIMBY and more desirable, and if you use this to draw any conclusions about housing policy you’ll just end up confused. But maybe I should take this same lesson to heart myself. Dense cities are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities; uninhabited tundra in North Dakota isn’t. Maybe the demand is just for trendy liberal coastal cities, and once you attain that status, extra density doesn’t matter that much. Maybe Oakland has already maxed out its “trendy liberal coastal city” status, and even if it became Manhattan-sized, it wouldn’t get any trendier, or would get trendier only with a long time lag. There are a few very trendy small coastal villages in California (think eg Sea Ranch); maybe these (rather than North Dakota) are the natural control group for San Francisco. I think they are still cheaper than SF, but maybe not by very much. Cameron Murray is a housing economist whose work some other commenters recommended; he also writes the blog Fresh Economic Thinking. He very kindly showed up and wrote: I think you are in general right that agglomeration effects are real, which is why bigger cities have higher value to residents. I agree that people move locations. But I think you can go a step further. If one city is growing faster and densifying, surely those people are not demanding homes in other cities and those cities build slower. This is part of the spatial equilibrium story that further makes claims about “build density and get cheap homes” less plausible. 7. My Final Thoughts + Poll Thanks to everyone who commented on this post and helped me refine my thoughts. I’m willing to concede the following points: It might be that only attracting the sort of educated people who found companies, universities, etc will make housing prices go up. Less educated people will take more jobs than they create and not ratchet up the city’s desirability level. (I’d previously told commenters talking about “gentrification” that it was irrelevant to the mechanism I was talking about here, but maybe it isn’t - maybe “gentrifiers” are the people creating more jobs and institutions than they consume, and so homes that attract them in particular will increase demand more than they increase supply? Maybe this discussion does reduce to the gentrification discussion?)
Inline links: source, Tom Thought, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!86gT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5788a8dd-c5ee-4111-be67-9c1533f7410b_335x172.png, Infinite Scroll, writes, Last House On The Left, writes, writes, quotes, Under-occupied Developments In China, writes, China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AAuI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d6a6159-a16f-45e3-b15a-e62cb2c73336_1200x900.jpeg, this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Paul Botts, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data, Tang Poetry, writes, ddd pointed out, Mike, Maximum Limelihood Estimator, gets more on point, http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf, writes, writes:, far higher in Austin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tAF8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03f2b338-da84-4d85-b71c-0ce2e02e10e1_685x559.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mLwn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9cf942da-5716-49e8-a177-20140681e7fc_573x421.png, Center for New Liberalism, the Neoliberal Podcast, Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, Johnson helped make famous, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tg5t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc490a60a-3e97-4b73-9806-79bb967b5172_608x550.png, Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
ACX bulletin board4 mentions across 4 issues

ACX bulletin board is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 26, 2024 and December 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board"; "ACX has an unofficial bulletin board"; "ACX has ... bulletin board". It most often appears alongside ACX Discord, Astralcodexten Com, ACX subreddit.

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ACX bulletin board
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
August 26, 2024
Last seen
December 08, 2025
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Open Thread 344
August 26, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 357
November 25, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 359
December 09, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 411
December 08, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Alameda Research4 mentions across 4 issues

Alameda Research is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between November 16, 2022 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "his Alameda Research fund"; "mer's deposits to gamble on shitcoins through his Alameda Research fund"; "Center for Effective Altruism leaders discussing concerns about Alameda Research in 2018". It most often appears alongside FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, Twitter.

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Alameda Research
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
November 16, 2022
Last seen
August 16, 2024
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Issue trail
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Source context
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
What a fucking asshole! Illegally stealing customer's deposits to gamble on shitcoins through his Alameda Research fund! He's the reason BTC was depressed this bull cycle. Sam is the reason I am still here watching fucking depressing crypto news instead of being completely out and having lower blood pressure... and he is a fucking customer of ours! What a weird fucking world this is.
Mantic Monday: Twitter Chaos Edition
November 21, 2022 · Original source
Polymarket again within 2% of Manifold. Only 23 traders here, and they’re a lot less optimistic than the Trump traders. FTX! 43 traders, seems like probably. I’ve seen a lot of Twitter takes about how rich well-connected people never get in trouble for this kind of thing, but the markets seem less cynical. 251 traders, and by the way amazing job by “mr22” who started this market on October 5. I also appreciate the relatively late end date - there’s another market “. . . by 2024” which is in the 30s, but that’s because people don’t trust the justice system to move quickly, not because they think he’ll be found innocent. There are a series of markets on sentence length which seem to suggest more than a month but less than a year in jail; this doesn’t really make sense to me and I’m going to nervously ignore them. Only 8 traders here, so take with a grain of salt, but this is a great example of the creative ways people are using Manifold. The market resolves not to “yes” or “no” but to the percent of FTX US users’ funds that they eventually get back; you make money if you were closer than other traders. Here they seem to think most people will only be getting about 14 cents on the dollar. There’s another market for FTX.US users which is a little higher at 29. 34 traders. I think this is too high; I bet it was some random third-tier insider, just because there are more of them and they’re under less scrutiny. Moving on to the effects on effective altruism in particular (just assume I have all possible conflicts of interest here): 272 traders, check the detailed resolution criteria. I think the strongest case is something like the one described in this article, about Center for Effective Altruism leaders discussing concerns about Alameda Research in 2018. The article doesn’t give specifics but my guess is they were the same issues Kerry Vaughn describes here (though see the followup comment by an employee who left FTX, casting doubt on Vaughn’s claims). That means the market hinges on whether Vaughn’s allegations fit the resolution criteria that “the unethical behavior must have been related to fraudulent investment strategies that involve spending other people's money without their permission”. Vaughn describes “poor capital controls, including a lack of distinction between money owned by investors and money owned by Alameda itself”, which sounds like it’s in that direction but could cover a wide variety of badness levels. My guess is everyone will end up agreeing that disgruntled Alameda employees whisper-networked that some things were bad about the company in 2018, some of the rumors got to CEA leaders, the leaders debated whether this was worse than normal for a tech startup, decided it didn’t rise to a level where they needed to publicly freak out, and moved on. Isaac will have to pay attention to the details as they come out and decide whether or not it qualifies. 45 traders. This seems to confirm that the CEA incident is responsible for most of the probability mass above; many fewer people think the FTX Future Fund (ie the charitable branch of FTX responsible for giving out their money) was in on this. Related: this market only has five traders, but I’m highlighting it anyway in the hopes that it gets more. The most money is on 2022. My guess is that we’ll find that they had terrible accounting practices in 2018-2019 of the sort that could be classified as criminally incompetent in a way that bled into fraud (but the trades went fine so nobody was harmed) and then they ramped it up a lot in 2022 to deal with the crypto crash. I think this market will be harder to resolve than people expect. 47 traders. Everyone is panicking about this possibility, but it looks like it’s not too likely. 10 traders. I’ll take this chance to say: a lot of media is predicting the death of EA, or a major blow to EA, or something in that category. Not going to happen. The media isn’t good at understanding people who do things for reasons other than PR. But most EAs really believe. Like, really believe. If every single other effective altruist in the world were completely discredited, I would just shrug and do effective altruism on my own. If they instituted the death penalty for effective altruism, I would do it under cover of night using ZCash. And I’m nowhere near the most committed effective altruist; honestly I’m probably below average. “Saint gets eaten by lions in Colosseum, can early Christianity possibly survive this setback?” Update your model or prepare to be constantly surprised. 6 traders. So, we lost several hundred million dollars of funding in a giant disaster which was also morally outrageous and demoralizing. It happens. But lots of people have already emailed me asking how to send in more money to help fill the gap. Some added something like “it was so depressing that all the FTX money meant my money didn’t make a difference, but now I can help again, and it’s great!” Can these people fill the hole? 32% chance that they can! 10 traders. And if they don’t, we’ll still probably do better than in 2021, before all the FTX money started rolling in. We’ll try harder to hammer in the point about not doing “ends justify the means” reasoning, and do some reorgs and purges to prevent anything like this from happening again, we’ll make a bunch of other changes - some reasonable, some panic-driven - but we’ll go on. If all the far-future stuff collapses, we’ll donate to global health charities. If the global health charities don’t work, we’ll fund GiveWell to sit around and figure out something that does. If GiveWell gets hit by an asteroid, we’ll work on asteroid deflection (actually I think we might already be doing that). If asteroid deflection turns out to be -EV, we’ll switch to shrimp welfare, or give ourselves Zika virus, or any of a million other things. You have no idea how committed we are to continuing to do effective altruism regardless of whether or not it’s “popular”. But it will be popular. 45 traders, resolution criteria at the link, notice the dip when the FTX news broke, followed by recovery as people had time to think it over more. Moving on to slightly less serious topics: The snapshot doesn’t show this, but one of the suggestions is Atlas Rugged. 67 traders, interesting to see where forecasters’ priorities lie. This was a big rumor early on, along with “everyone was on meth”, but the on site psychiatrist said it was false during an interview. 13 traders. WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP GOING ON PODCASTS? Midterms! That was two weeks ago? It feels like years! A week before the midterms, I wrote: Polymarket, Manifold, and PredictIt now have shiny interfaces for predicting the upcoming US midterm elections. In terms of the Republicans taking the Senate, Polymarket is at 65%, Manifold at 58%, PredictIt at 73%, and 538 at 49%. Congratulations 538! Mike Saint Antoine (who wrote the review of Viral in the last Book Review Contest) has put some more work into scoring midterm election forecasts. Here are some headline results: Mike writes: The reason I didn’t just do a three-way comparison between PredictIt, FiveThirtyEight, and Manifold Markets is that the Manifold Markets forecasts included fewer questions than the PredictIt and FiveThirtyEight forecasts. So in order to do a fair comparison here, I’ll be comparing the smaller subset of questions for which PredictIt and Manifold Markets both gave a forecast. So it looks like both Manifold and 538 did better than PredictIt, and there’s no clear way to tell which of the former did better. (except I guess you could do this analysis with just the subset of questions Manifold and 538 share, but Mike didn’t and I’m also not going to). PredictIt has a pretty consistent Republican bias (it’s a minor epistemic sin to accuse a prediction market of having a predictable bias unless you’ve made money exploiting it, I made $600 this election so I’ll let myself pass). In years when Republicans do better than expected, it will probably look better than other markets; in years when they do worse, it will look worse. Still, this is a bias, so I think we should take them doing worse this year as a fair reflection of their accuracy, even thought next year it could go the other way. My main two takeaways here are: PredictIt isn’t yet good enough that the ideal theorems showing prediction markets should be unbiased and better than everyone else apply to it. The obvious explanation is its $800-per-question cap. Polymarket doesn’t have that cap and it did better, although Mike hasn’t done a formal comparison to 538.
Inline links: more than a month, less than a year, FTX.US users, this article, here, Not going to happen, some reorgs and purges to prevent anything like this from happening again, I think we might already be doing that, turns out to be -EV, shrimp welfare, give ourselves Zika virus, wrote, Polymarket, Manifold, PredictIt, 538, Viral, scoring midterm election forecasts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z0IM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcfb99af-ec23-4ff9-bcec-ffe248821898_1800x900.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NSlN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc9c5602d-e060-454b-8a20-10e925c57526_1800x900.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vBga!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b35fbd9-ee89-4f4f-b8b9-832742e483fd_881x289.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h6tt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9355d197-997a-4c48-93c0-76abc23f2c12_881x287.png
Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
Sam Bankman-Fried's origin story begins in a similar manner: his foray into cryptocurrency began with the Alameda Research trading firm, whose first mission was focused on an arbitrage opportunity that they discovered: the story, as SBF tells it, is that there was enough of a price differential between the price of cryptocurrency on US and Japanese exchanges that, if you were set up to trade in both markets, you could exploit the difference and make "free money."
"High returns with no risk" sounds too good to be true, but a 2018 fundraising deck for Alameda Research makes exactly that promise:
SBF, much like Ponzi, was desperately in search of something that would actually make his operation profitable, as SBF wasn't nearly as successful as he portrayed himself to be: according to bankruptcy professionals managing the entities that SBF helmed, between Alameda Research and FTX, he posted a net loss of $3.7 billion from inception to 2021. Raiding customer deposits – and getting people to "invest" in FTX's native cryptocurrency FTT – gave them the liquidity to keep operating.
Inline links: net loss of $3.7 billion from inception to 2021
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
None of #2 takes away from the fact that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were brilliant storytellers that created innovations in the medium that had never been seen before I am going to start with my second point: How is it possible to say that storytelling is getting better? Michael Lewis’ book, Going Infinite, about Sam-Bankman Fried (founder of FTX and Alameda Research, and convicted of fraud in November 2023) was controversial mostly because Lewis suggested that Sam was a good hearted, misunderstood guy who wasn’t really doing anything wrong. But it was also controversial for a quote from Sam about William Shakespeare. Here is part of the original blog post by Sam: I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare and the constitution and Stradivarius violins, and at the bottom of this post I do*, but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate--probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable. This quote blew up and became the story of the day among the intelligentsia on Twitter. Was Shakespeare the greatest playwright? And if he was, what is the counter argument to Sam’s point. How could it be possible that the greatest writer of all time was born in a period when there were less than 3.5MM English speakers on the planet, and only about 20% were literate? Even if he was the best writer of the 700,000 writers of the time, how is it possible he is better than the ~1.5 BILLION literate native-level English speakers alive today? Sam’s point is that it would be highly unlikely. One explanation is that Shakespeare may not have been the best writer, but he was a very good writer (the best of his time), and that he was able to pick up the low hanging fruit of writing ideas. Once Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet, no one else could write Romeo and Juliet (well they could, but then they would be derivative of Shakespeare’s work). The idea here is that there are innovative ideas in storytelling (and all art). The writers and artists that come first have their pick of possibilities. As more art gets created it gets harder and harder to come up with new ideas. Meanwhile the old ideas, once created, are there to be used. Richard Hanania quotes Anne Gat in pointing out there are three ways to understand greatness: Intrinsic: He produced the best plays and sonnets by some objective standard. This can be in an elitist sense focusing on the impact his work has on the most refined among us, or a more “democratic” one where the same can be said for all humans.
Inline links: Going, Sam-Bankman Fried, original blog post, Richard Hanania, Anne Gat
Alignment Research Center4 mentions across 4 issues

Alignment Research Center is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 20, 2021 and February 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Paul Christiano will be founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center"; "founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center"; "ELK ... run by the Alignment Research Center (including familiar names like Paul Christiano )". It most often appears alongside Paul Christiano, GPT-3, OpenAI.

Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
May 20, 2021
Last seen
February 20, 2025
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Links For May
May 20, 2021 · Original source
35: Recent news in local AI alignment research space: most of OpenAI’s top alignment researchers, including Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, Jack Clark, and Paul Christano, left en masse for poorly-understood reasons (see speculation here). Dario Amodei is now working with a new nonprofit called Cooperative AI Foundation. Paul Christiano will be founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center (conflict of interest notice: I know Paul and think he is generally great); see also his ask-me-anything thread on Less Wrong here. Unrelatedly, local secretive AI alignment research group MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) is leaving the Bay Area for some small town with affordable land prices where they can maybe build a campus (they’re still trying to decide exactly where).
Inline links: left en masse for poorly-understood reasons, here, Cooperative AI Foundation, Alignment Research Center, his ask-me-anything thread on Less Wrong here, leaving the Bay Area
ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI
July 26, 2022 · Original source
Extended far enough, this line of thinking leads to ELK (Eliciting Latent Knowledge), a technical report / contest / paradigm run by the Alignment Research Center (including familiar names like Paul Christiano).
Inline links: Eliciting Latent Knowledge, Paul Christiano
"Through A Glass Darkly" In Asterisk Magazine
June 26, 2023 · Original source
Crash Testing GPT-4: Before releasing GPT-4, OpenAI sent a preliminary version to the Alignment Research Center to test it for unsafe capabilities; the detail that made the news was how the AI managed to hire a gig worker to solve CAPTCHAs for it by pretending to be a blind person. Asterisk interviews Beth Barnes, leader of the team that ran those tests.
Inline links: Crash Testing GPT-4, made the news
Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
February 20, 2025 · Original source
St. Joanne of ARC had a resume so beautiful that Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk all sought her hand as employee. They became increasingly insistent that she choose one of them, and refused to take ‘no’ as an answer. She asked Paul Christiano what to do, and on his advice she called the three men together and said “I will make my decision once my simple twenty-line program finishes running”. After they agreed, she revealed that her program was calculating BusyBeaver(100), and they all admitted they were unworthy of her. She cut her hair, gave her jewelry to the poor, and joined the Alignment Research Center, where she discovered many important theorems. Some say Jane Street is named after her, although others attribute it to a St. Jane of Manhattan who is otherwise unrecorded.
ALLFED4 mentions across 4 issues

ALLFED is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 28, 2021 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Morgan Rivers , $30,000, to help ALLFED improve modeling of food security during global catastrophes"; "ALLFED tries to develop solutions"; "Support For ALLFED’s Disaster Modeling". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX, African Swine Fever.

Article page
ALLFED
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
December 28, 2021
Last seen
June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Morgan Rivers, $30,000, to help ALLFED improve modeling of food security during global catastrophes. ALLFED studies the effects of major disasters - nuclear wars, pandemics, economic collapses - on the food supply. If the disaster blotted out the sun or paralyzed the technological-economic infrastructure underpinning food production and delivery, millions more could die of starvation. ALLFED tries to develop solutions, from high-tech stuff like "produc[ing] high quality protein from natural gas and sugar from forest biomass" and low-tech stuff like relocating crops farming and eating more seaweed. Their current project is to update the National Disaster Preparedness Baseline Assessment program, which is "used widely to assess and prioritize responses to disasters globally", to better model food shocks - raising awareness and making it easier for large organizations to think about them. ALLFED is also looking for more funding for many other projects.
Inline links: Morgan Rivers, ALLFED
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
21: Support For ALLFED’s Disaster Modeling (?/10) They have asked me not to discuss their progress yet.
Issue Two Of Asterisk
March 08, 2023 · Original source
Plus superforecaster Juan Cambeiro on predicting pandemics, Mike Hinge on feeding the world through nuclear/volcanic winter (his organization, ALLFED, got an ACX grant last year), Dynomight on how a big NIH alcohol study went wrong (hopefully you already read this on his excellent blog), Jordan Hampton with the obligatory wild animal suffering article, Matt Reynolds on oral rehydration therapy, and more.
Inline links: predicting pandemics, feeding the world through nuclear/volcanic winter, an ACX grant, how a big NIH alcohol study went wrong, excellent blog, the obligatory wild animal suffering article, on oral rehydration therapy
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
21: Support For ALLFED’s Disaster Modeling
No response. More information about ALLFED as a whole and their progress here.
Inline links: here
ARC4 mentions across 4 issues

ARC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 17, 2022 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ARC is an acronym for Affordable, Robust, Compact and is an Iron Man reference"; "ARC notes that neural nets can have multiple 'heads' on the same 'body'"; "a list of ARC’s attempts to solve the problem so far". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, CERN, ELK.

Article page
ARC
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
June 17, 2022
Last seen
September 19, 2025
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Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
[17]: SPARC is a nested acronym for Smallest Possible ARC. ARC is an acronym for Affordable, Robust, Compact and is an Iron Man reference.
ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI
July 26, 2022 · Original source
Extended far enough, this line of thinking leads to ELK (Eliciting Latent Knowledge), a technical report / contest / paradigm run by the Alignment Research Center (including familiar names like Paul Christiano).
Inline links: Eliciting Latent Knowledge, Paul Christiano
DALL-E: “A beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” Probably just a coincidence. III. Ipso Facto, Ergo ELK The ELK Technical Report And Contest are a list of ARC’s attempts to solve the problem so far, and a call for further solutions. It starts with a toy problem: a superintelligent security AI guarding a diamond. Every so often, thieves come in and try to steal the diamond, the AI manipulates some incomprehensible set of sensors and levers and doodads and traps, and the theft either succeeds or fails. Everyone agrees that trying to understand ELK is terrible, so please accept these delightful illustrations by María Gutiérrez-Rojas as compensation. We train the AI by running millions of simulations where it plays against simulated thieves. At first it flails randomly. But as time goes on, it moves towards strategies that make it win more often, learning more and more about how to deploy its doodads and traps most effectively. As it approaches superintelligence, it even starts extruding new traps and doodads we didn’t design, things we have no idea what they even do. Things get spooky. A thief comes in, gets to the diamond, then just seems to vanish. Another ELK report illustration. In the top part, we easily understand what’s happening - the AI is activating a trap door, plunging the thief into a spike pit. In the bottom part, we’re not sure. The AI does something incomprehensible, and all we know is that the thief is gone and the diamond is intact This is good - we wanted a superintelligent security AI, and we got one. But we can no longer evaluate its reasoning. All we can do is judge its results: is the diamond still there at the end of the simulation? If we see the diamond, we press the REWARD lever; if it’s gone, we press the PUNISHMENT lever. The training process. The AI does some incomprehensible thing. We check whether the diamond is safe or not. Then we rate it as good or bad. The AI gradient descends away from bad strategies, towards good ones. Eventually we’ve trained the AI very well and it has an apparent 100% success rate. What could go wrong? If we’re very paranoid, we might notice that the task at which we have a 100% success rate is causing the AI to get good ratings. How does the AI get good ratings? By making us think the diamond is safe. Hopefully this is correlated with the diamond actually being safe. But we haven’t proven this, have we? Suppose the simulated thief has hit upon the strategy of taping a photo of the diamond to the front of the camera lens. At the end of the training session, the simulated thief escapes with the diamond. The human observer sees the camera image of the safe diamond and gives the strategy a “good” rating. The AI gradient descends in the direction of helping thieves tape photos to cameras. Notice the “reality” section of the third example. The thief has made it look (to the human) like the diamond is safe. The human sees a diamond and positively reinforces the AI. The AI learns that thieves stealing the diamonds and fooling humans about it is great. It’s important not to think of this as the thief “defeating” or “fooling” the AI. The AI could be fully superintelligent, able to outfox the thief trivially or destroy him with a thought, and that wouldn’t change the situation at all. The problem is that the AI was never a thief-stopping machine. It was always a reward-getting machine, and it turns out the AI can get more reward by cooperating with the thief than by thwarting him. So the interesting scientific point here isn’t “you can fool a camera by taping a photo to it”. The interesting point is “we thought we were training an AI to do one thing, but actually we had no idea what was going on, and we were training it to do something else”. In fact, maybe the thief never tries this, and the AI comes up with this plan itself! In the process of randomly manipulating traps and doodads, it might hit on the policy of manipulating the images it sends through the camera. If it manipulates the image to look like the diamond is still there (even when it isn’t), that will always get good feedback, and the AI will be incentivized to double down on that strategy. Much like in the GPT-3 example, if the training simulations include examples of thieves fooling human observers which are marked as “good”, the AI will definitely learn the goal “try to convince humans that the diamond is safe”. If the training simulations are perfect and everyone is very careful, it will just maybe learn this goal - a million cases of the diamond being safe and humans saying this is good fail to distinguish between “good means the diamond is safe” and “good means humans think the diamond is safe”. The machine will make its decision for inscrutable AI reasons, or just flip a coin. So, again, are you feeling lucky? IV. "I'm Not Owned!" I Continue To Insist As I Slowly Shrink And Transform Into A Paperclip In real life there are some trivial kludges you might try first here. Force the AI to give its human raters 3D models of the entire room instead of just camera images. Hire a really good cybersecurity person to make sure the camera is un-hackable. These are too boring to be worth the ARC team’s time. This scenario is a metaphor for this broader class of situations - including GPT-3 lying to you and superintelligences trying to turn you into paperclips. So assume you live in Security Hell where you can never be fully sure your information channels aren’t hacked. The AI can be fully sure - it’s superintelligent or whatever - but you, personally, cannot. Your only solution is to somehow make the AI tell you the truth. And so we return to ELK. We add an ELK head on to the superintelligent security AI, train it to report truthfully on the AI’s innards. Then we ask: is the diamond really safe? The ELK head consults the innards, processes the memory banks of the security vault AI according to some function, and reports back with an answer. The ARC team really like modeling this as Bayes nets: I don’t know much about these, but from the picture I gather they’re kind of like causal diagrams or neural networks - a member in good standing of the broad class of “little circles connected by lines”. Each circle corresponds to some concept in the AI’s innards (roughly defined; the AI’s “concepts” might be completely incomprehensible to us), and anything the AI knows corresponds to some combination of circle activations and weights. We humans also have some Bayes net, probably very different from the AI’s. The job of the ELK head - our purpose-trained truth-telling AI - is to translate from the AI’s ontology to ours and back again. This matters because the reporter (ie the ELK head) needs a good model of both the security AI’s Bayes net, and the human programmer’s Bayes net. But since it has the model of the human Bayes net, it can (if it wants) do inference there. That is, the failure mode is that the reporter AI tries to tell me what I expected to hear, instead of what’s true. One barrier to that is that the reporter AI might not know what I expect to hear. Unfortunately, that barrier is easy to overcome, because it has to know how humans think, so it could ask itself “what would a human expect to hear in this situation?” The ARC team discuss two classes of translation system: The direct translator (good) looks at what the security AI is “thinking”, faithfully translates its conclusions, and accurately relays them to its programmers.
Inline links: ELK Technical Report, Contest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LlSa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F07e5360a-89ad-4334-b785-28c498904bb2_620x446.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2E3e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05896826-7bf0-4b31-8ab9-71fbf7075291_642x416.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ppqw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F979f566a-2d5b-49b1-8a62-7fe9b7420a60_603x458.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ph5E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F182e39bd-264f-4e6c-a2c5-993fde21da9a_430x134.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E6m9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F208c417e-2a6e-43e1-bd96-ef61e6cb3042_745x446.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!46JI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d65a74a-588b-4a38-8083-0992a4ac7c04_643x571.png
Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate?
November 28, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
After his Framework was published in 1962, under the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center to make, in essence, some version of the Memex a reality. The ARC received funding from NASA and ARPA, and after six years, Engelbart released his oN-Line System (NLS). It was a revelation.
ACX community3 mentions across 3 issues

ACX community is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 25, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "they've decided that the ACX community is close enough to count"; ""the ACX community for selecting me as the winner""; "Congratulations to the ACX community members involved in this research". It most often appears alongside Germany, US, /r/georgism.

Article page
ACX community
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
July 25, 2021
Last seen
October 30, 2025
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Open Thread 182
July 25, 2021 · Original source
2: My friends Claire and Buck are trying to distribute money earmarked for rationalist/EA "outreach", and they've decided that the ACX community is close enough to count. If you're doing any ACX community work - for example, running a local meetup group, a podcast, a mailing list, etc - and you think you could do a better job with more money, consider getting in touch with them. It doesn't have to be ACX-branded in particular, it can also just be about related topics. Read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WAkvnzxvNfeTJL4BT/funds-are-available-to-support-lesswrong-groups-among-others for more information.
Inline links: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WAkvnzxvNfeTJL4BT/funds-are-available-to-support-lesswrong-groups-among-others
Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Scott for running the Book Review contest, and the ACX community for selecting me as the winner
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
25: IVG advance: for the first time, scientists have successfully turned a skin cell into an egg cell, although it “is not ready to be fertilised by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes” and “the method requires significant refinement - which could take a decade - before a fertility clinic could even consider using it”. Congratulations to the ACX community members involved in this research.
Inline links: scientists have successfully turned a skin cell into an egg cell
ACX Meetup3 mentions across 3 issues

ACX Meetup is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 10, 2022 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Meetup sign attached to a red camping chair"; "including the local ACX meetup"; "carrying an ACX MEETUP sign". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page
ACX Meetup
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
AMMAN, JORDAN Contact: Daniel (dnledvs@gmail.com) Date: May 21 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: 8G3QXW3H+W3 Location: We'll meet at Dali cafe in Jabal Weibdeh, and will be sitting at the outdoor tables. I'll be wearing a red shirt and will have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Notes: We're trying to grow the community, so feel free to bring a friend!
Inline links: 8G3QXW3H+W3
CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy B (andy.bachler@gmail.com) Date: April 13 Time: 5:45 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4FC+34 Location: Badger & Co (a pub in ANU). I will be wearing glasses and will have a sign with ACX MeetUp on it. Notes: Apologies that this might be tricky to get to for some people but the parking at ANU should be a bit easier after 5pm!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4FC+34
JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Jati (indonesiarationalist@gmail.com) Date: May 8 Time: 3:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58RR8G+J4Q Location: Kawisari Cafe & Eatery in Menteng, Central Jakarta. The nearest train station is Gondangdia (15 minutes walk or just take an online moto-taxi). Feel free to bring whatever you think could be fun or exciting! The organizer will be there from 15.00 WIB. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or send an E-mail to the above address. Group info: Jakarta has a rationality-adjacent group that meets occasionally, so some members of that group will come to this ACX meetup.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58RR8G+J4Q
Open Thread 352
October 21, 2024 · Original source
5: I am also being asked to advertise NOAI, a conference in New Orleans. It seems to be a joint project of many local philosophical and cultural groups, including the local ACX meetup. There will be AI content, chess boxing, a charitable donation game, and an afterparty at Francis Ford Coppola’s house (I will be disappointed if it’s not made of Megalon). Astral Codex Ten is listed as a sponsor, but I want to clarify that this is the local meetup group only and that I know nothing about it besides what’s listed here. That having been said, I am prepared to endorse it for a sufficient payment in Megalon.
Inline links: NOAI
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Extra Info For Meetup Organizers: 1. If you’re the host, bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” and prop it up somewhere (or otherwise be identifiable). 2. Bring blank labels and pens for nametags. 3. If you’re having trouble thinking of something to talk about, the attendees probably also read ACX. Ask people about a recent post or book review that they liked. 4. If it’s the first meetup, people are probably just going to want to talk, and you shouldn’t try to organize some kind of planned workshop or anything like that. 5. Have people type their name and email address in a spreadsheet or in a Google Form (accessed via a bit.ly link or QR code), so you can start a mailing list to make organizing future meetups easier. 6. It’s easier to schedule a followup meetup while you’re having the first, compared to trying to do it later on by email. 7. If you didn’t make a LessWrong event for your meetup (or if you did but Skyler didn’t know about it) the LessWrong team did it for you using the username or email address you gave on the form. To claim your event, log into LW (or create an account) using that email address, or message the LW team on Intercom (chat button in the bottom right corner of lesswrong.com).
Contact: Shai Contact Info: Tenastralcodex[at]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, October 29, 05:00 PM Location: We'll be in the goldmund bookstore , at ekron 6 in the talpiot market area, and I will be wearing a batik/Hawaiian shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSclSIRSpd [remove this bit] SJ6T5VJT2QAD Additional Notes: Please RSVP on whatsapp/our group email so I know how many people will participate
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C
Contact: Tegan Contact Info: teganspeaking[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: The Gardeners Cottage Restaurant, Newlands. I will have an "ACX Meetup" sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW2FH4+VV Group Link: https://discord.gg/GnY [remove this bit] cNB24
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4FRW2FH4+VV
ACX survey3 mentions across 3 issues

ACX survey is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2023 and May 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I’ll post a replication attempt from the ACX survey data"; "I asked people about their gender and their joint disorders on the ACX survey"; "on the ACX survey". It most often appears alongside ACX Survey, ACX Survey Results, Adderall.

Article page
ACX survey
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
March 16, 2023
Last seen
May 15, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
Pirate Wires recently reported that transgender and bisexual people were more likely (20 - 25%) to report Long COVID compared to cisgender and straight people (~15%, yes, all these numbers are really high and you shouldn’t exactly believe them). There are lots of possible confounders, and I’ll post a replication attempt from the ACX survey data sometime, but a pretty plausible explanation is that some Long COVID is psychosomatic, all forms of neurodivergence correlate with each other, and so bi and trans people will report more of every psychosomatic condition.
Inline links: Pirate Wires recently reported
In order to learn more about this, I asked people about their gender and their joint disorders on the ACX survey, taken by about 7000 people.
Some ACX survey respondents kindly indicated that I could email them if I had any questions about their responses. I asked some trans people with joint mobility issues to tell me their stories. Here’s a typical response:
Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context
June 08, 2023 · Original source
IQ affects grades more than political affiliation (liberal vs. conservative) affects whether or not you like Donald Trump (on the ACX survey).
Political conservatism vs. support for Trump (on ACX survey): 0.5
Inline links: 0.5
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
May 15, 2025 · Original source
But it’s not just addiction. What if they wander into the wrong part of the Internet and become incels, or SJWs with seven genders, or sedevacantists? Lots of people get one or another mind virus; why should my kids be immune? Because I’ll give them a happy childhood? I checked this on the ACX survey, and although alt-rightists did have significantly less happy childhoods than normal liberals (5.93 vs. 6.70 on a ten-point scale), the effect was too weak to rely on on an individual level (46% of alt-rightists had happier childhoods than the average liberal). Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu? And what about our daughter? What percent of women from intellectually-inclined non-practicing-Jewish families avoid becoming insane woke people? 20%? 10%? Sure, we’ll try to inculcate her into our reasonable liberal culture. But what do you think all those woke teenagers are rebelling against?
acxatlanta.com3 mentions across 3 issues

acxatlanta.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/"; "Group Link: https://ACXAtlanta.com". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, ABUJA, ACX.

Article page
acxatlanta.com
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve French Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA 30318, USA. We will be in the breezeway in the front. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96 Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96, https://acxatlanta.com/
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, April 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW Atlanta, GA 30318, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V, https://acxatlanta.com/
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[a t]digitaltoolfactory[period]net Time: Saturday, September 13th, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1, Atlanta, GA 30318 We will be by the front doors in the breezeway with a yellow table sign saying "ACX" Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8W Group Link: https://ACXAtlanta.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8W
African School of Economics3 mentions across 3 issues

African School of Economics is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 10, 2024 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "build a campus for the African School of Economics in Fumba, Zanzibar"; "African School of Economics-Zanzibar"; "African Urban Lab , a joint project of the African School of Economics in Zanzibar". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Charter Cities Institute, Coalition To Modify NOTA.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
February 10, 2024
Last seen
October 13, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Kurtis Lockhart, $100,000, to help build a campus for the African School of Economics in Fumba, Zanzibar. We talked recently about the difficulty of using charity to accelerate market development in lower-income countries, so I was delighted to come across such a perfect opportunity. I’m especially excited about being able to do this in Fumba, the Charter Cities Institute’s “flagship new cities project” in Africa.
Inline links: the difficulty of using charity to accelerate market development, “flagship new cities project”
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Kurtis Lockhart, $85K, to continue research into African urbanism. Africa suffers from a sort of malignant anarcho-tyrannical NIMBYism, where the ability to build good urban infrastructure like roads, sanitation systems, or apartment buildings is gated behind an impossible series of permits and applications that the government never grants, but it’s easy to build endless illegal shantytowns. Kurtis runs the African Urban Lab, a joint project of the African School of Economics in Zanzibar and the Charter Cities Institute. They hope to build an “African YIMBY movement” within African academia/government to improve the situation in time to help the 900 million new people predicted to move to African cities in the next 25 years. Our grant will fund road planning advocacy, a satellite-based land tax system, and improvements to African universities’ urban planning curricula. Read more about Kurtis’ agenda in his Asterisk article, Yes In My Bamako Yard.
Inline links: African Urban Lab, Charter Cities Institute, Yes In My Bamako Yard
AI 20273 mentions across 3 issues

AI 2027 is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 21, 2025 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "AMA with the AI 2027 team is planned for this Friday"; "I’m there sometimes with the AI 2027 team"; "AI Futures Project (the AI 2027 people)". It most often appears alongside 4o, 60 Minutes, @MattZeitlin.

Article page
AI 2027
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
April 21, 2025
Last seen
February 05, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 378
April 21, 2025 · Original source
4: Sorry for the delay, AMA with the AI 2027 team is planned for this Friday, 3:30 - 6 Pacific time. I’ll post a confirmation of this later this week.
Open Thread 382
May 19, 2025 · Original source
3: Constellation is an AI safety coworking space in Berkeley. They offer a fellowship where you can work at their office for 3-6 months. I’m there sometimes with the AI 2027 team and recommend it as a great place to work and meet people. Applications close June 13.
Inline links: a fellowship where you can work at their office for 3-6 months
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
37: AI Futures Project (the AI 2027 people) have published their updated timelines and takeoff model. Hard to summarize because they have a complex probability distribution and different team members think different things. For example:
Inline links: AI 2027, updated timelines and takeoff model
I don’t think this is quite right - I think they’re actually following their math and so when they redid the math and got different results they said so - but I agree it’s ironic that when everyone else had long timelines, AIFP went short, and now that everyone else is starting to come around, AIFP’s going longer again. AIFP has also responded to titotal’s critique of their timeline model here.
Inline links: responded to titotal’s critique of their timeline model here
Alameda3 mentions across 3 issues

Alameda is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 13, 2022 and November 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "FTX/Alameda higher-up around 2018"; "I trusted and looked up to the FTX/Alameda people"; "tweet by the Alameda CEO". It most often appears alongside FTX, Alameda Research, Bahamas.

Article page
Alameda
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
November 13, 2022
Last seen
November 21, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 250
November 13, 2022 · Original source
My emotional conflict of interest here is that I’m really f#%king devastated. I never met or communicated with SBF, but I was friendly with another FTX/Alameda higher-up around 2018, before they moved abroad. At the time they seemed like a remarkably kind, decent, and thoughtful person, and I liked them a lot. I desperately want to believe they didn’t know about the fraud, but it seems really implausible. If they did, then I genuinely have no idea what happened, and I hope the investigation finds some reasonable explanation, like that they were doing so many stimulants and psychedelics that the DMT entities were piloting their body like an anime mech. I probably shouldn’t exactly say “I hope they’re okay” when there are so many victims who deserve okayness more. But I hope there’s some other world-branch where they never got involved in any of this and they’re living their best life and doing lots of good, and I hope the version of me in that world branch is giving them the support and reassurance that I can’t give them here.
More generally, I trusted and looked up to the FTX/Alameda people. I didn’t actually keep money in FTX, but I would have if there had been any reason to; I didn’t actually tell other people they should trust FTX, but I would have if those other people had asked. Lower your opinion of me accordingly.
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
As far as I can tell, nobody has evidence beyond this tweet by the Alameda CEO:
Conflict of interest notices: I was friends with an FTX/Alameda employee a few years ago. I support the effective altruist movement, which FTX donated money to. I briefly worked at the same San Francisco clinic as Dr. Lerner, a psychiatrist mentioned in this piece - but I’m so introverted at work that I never actually met him.
What a fucking asshole! Illegally stealing customer's deposits to gamble on shitcoins through his Alameda Research fund! He's the reason BTC was depressed this bull cycle. Sam is the reason I am still here watching fucking depressing crypto news instead of being completely out and having lower blood pressure... and he is a fucking customer of ours! What a weird fucking world this is.
Mantic Monday: Twitter Chaos Edition
November 21, 2022 · Original source
Polymarket again within 2% of Manifold. Only 23 traders here, and they’re a lot less optimistic than the Trump traders. FTX! 43 traders, seems like probably. I’ve seen a lot of Twitter takes about how rich well-connected people never get in trouble for this kind of thing, but the markets seem less cynical. 251 traders, and by the way amazing job by “mr22” who started this market on October 5. I also appreciate the relatively late end date - there’s another market “. . . by 2024” which is in the 30s, but that’s because people don’t trust the justice system to move quickly, not because they think he’ll be found innocent. There are a series of markets on sentence length which seem to suggest more than a month but less than a year in jail; this doesn’t really make sense to me and I’m going to nervously ignore them. Only 8 traders here, so take with a grain of salt, but this is a great example of the creative ways people are using Manifold. The market resolves not to “yes” or “no” but to the percent of FTX US users’ funds that they eventually get back; you make money if you were closer than other traders. Here they seem to think most people will only be getting about 14 cents on the dollar. There’s another market for FTX.US users which is a little higher at 29. 34 traders. I think this is too high; I bet it was some random third-tier insider, just because there are more of them and they’re under less scrutiny. Moving on to the effects on effective altruism in particular (just assume I have all possible conflicts of interest here): 272 traders, check the detailed resolution criteria. I think the strongest case is something like the one described in this article, about Center for Effective Altruism leaders discussing concerns about Alameda Research in 2018. The article doesn’t give specifics but my guess is they were the same issues Kerry Vaughn describes here (though see the followup comment by an employee who left FTX, casting doubt on Vaughn’s claims). That means the market hinges on whether Vaughn’s allegations fit the resolution criteria that “the unethical behavior must have been related to fraudulent investment strategies that involve spending other people's money without their permission”. Vaughn describes “poor capital controls, including a lack of distinction between money owned by investors and money owned by Alameda itself”, which sounds like it’s in that direction but could cover a wide variety of badness levels. My guess is everyone will end up agreeing that disgruntled Alameda employees whisper-networked that some things were bad about the company in 2018, some of the rumors got to CEA leaders, the leaders debated whether this was worse than normal for a tech startup, decided it didn’t rise to a level where they needed to publicly freak out, and moved on. Isaac will have to pay attention to the details as they come out and decide whether or not it qualifies. 45 traders. This seems to confirm that the CEA incident is responsible for most of the probability mass above; many fewer people think the FTX Future Fund (ie the charitable branch of FTX responsible for giving out their money) was in on this. Related: this market only has five traders, but I’m highlighting it anyway in the hopes that it gets more. The most money is on 2022. My guess is that we’ll find that they had terrible accounting practices in 2018-2019 of the sort that could be classified as criminally incompetent in a way that bled into fraud (but the trades went fine so nobody was harmed) and then they ramped it up a lot in 2022 to deal with the crypto crash. I think this market will be harder to resolve than people expect. 47 traders. Everyone is panicking about this possibility, but it looks like it’s not too likely. 10 traders. I’ll take this chance to say: a lot of media is predicting the death of EA, or a major blow to EA, or something in that category. Not going to happen. The media isn’t good at understanding people who do things for reasons other than PR. But most EAs really believe. Like, really believe. If every single other effective altruist in the world were completely discredited, I would just shrug and do effective altruism on my own. If they instituted the death penalty for effective altruism, I would do it under cover of night using ZCash. And I’m nowhere near the most committed effective altruist; honestly I’m probably below average. “Saint gets eaten by lions in Colosseum, can early Christianity possibly survive this setback?” Update your model or prepare to be constantly surprised. 6 traders. So, we lost several hundred million dollars of funding in a giant disaster which was also morally outrageous and demoralizing. It happens. But lots of people have already emailed me asking how to send in more money to help fill the gap. Some added something like “it was so depressing that all the FTX money meant my money didn’t make a difference, but now I can help again, and it’s great!” Can these people fill the hole? 32% chance that they can! 10 traders. And if they don’t, we’ll still probably do better than in 2021, before all the FTX money started rolling in. We’ll try harder to hammer in the point about not doing “ends justify the means” reasoning, and do some reorgs and purges to prevent anything like this from happening again, we’ll make a bunch of other changes - some reasonable, some panic-driven - but we’ll go on. If all the far-future stuff collapses, we’ll donate to global health charities. If the global health charities don’t work, we’ll fund GiveWell to sit around and figure out something that does. If GiveWell gets hit by an asteroid, we’ll work on asteroid deflection (actually I think we might already be doing that). If asteroid deflection turns out to be -EV, we’ll switch to shrimp welfare, or give ourselves Zika virus, or any of a million other things. You have no idea how committed we are to continuing to do effective altruism regardless of whether or not it’s “popular”. But it will be popular. 45 traders, resolution criteria at the link, notice the dip when the FTX news broke, followed by recovery as people had time to think it over more. Moving on to slightly less serious topics: The snapshot doesn’t show this, but one of the suggestions is Atlas Rugged. 67 traders, interesting to see where forecasters’ priorities lie. This was a big rumor early on, along with “everyone was on meth”, but the on site psychiatrist said it was false during an interview. 13 traders. WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP GOING ON PODCASTS? Midterms! That was two weeks ago? It feels like years! A week before the midterms, I wrote: Polymarket, Manifold, and PredictIt now have shiny interfaces for predicting the upcoming US midterm elections. In terms of the Republicans taking the Senate, Polymarket is at 65%, Manifold at 58%, PredictIt at 73%, and 538 at 49%. Congratulations 538! Mike Saint Antoine (who wrote the review of Viral in the last Book Review Contest) has put some more work into scoring midterm election forecasts. Here are some headline results: Mike writes: The reason I didn’t just do a three-way comparison between PredictIt, FiveThirtyEight, and Manifold Markets is that the Manifold Markets forecasts included fewer questions than the PredictIt and FiveThirtyEight forecasts. So in order to do a fair comparison here, I’ll be comparing the smaller subset of questions for which PredictIt and Manifold Markets both gave a forecast. So it looks like both Manifold and 538 did better than PredictIt, and there’s no clear way to tell which of the former did better. (except I guess you could do this analysis with just the subset of questions Manifold and 538 share, but Mike didn’t and I’m also not going to). PredictIt has a pretty consistent Republican bias (it’s a minor epistemic sin to accuse a prediction market of having a predictable bias unless you’ve made money exploiting it, I made $600 this election so I’ll let myself pass). In years when Republicans do better than expected, it will probably look better than other markets; in years when they do worse, it will look worse. Still, this is a bias, so I think we should take them doing worse this year as a fair reflection of their accuracy, even thought next year it could go the other way. My main two takeaways here are: PredictIt isn’t yet good enough that the ideal theorems showing prediction markets should be unbiased and better than everyone else apply to it. The obvious explanation is its $800-per-question cap. Polymarket doesn’t have that cap and it did better, although Mike hasn’t done a formal comparison to 538.
Inline links: more than a month, less than a year, FTX.US users, this article, here, Not going to happen, some reorgs and purges to prevent anything like this from happening again, I think we might already be doing that, turns out to be -EV, shrimp welfare, give ourselves Zika virus, wrote, Polymarket, Manifold, PredictIt, 538, Viral, scoring midterm election forecasts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z0IM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcfb99af-ec23-4ff9-bcec-ffe248821898_1800x900.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NSlN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc9c5602d-e060-454b-8a20-10e925c57526_1800x900.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vBga!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b35fbd9-ee89-4f4f-b8b9-832742e483fd_881x289.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h6tt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9355d197-997a-4c48-93c0-76abc23f2c12_881x287.png
Alcoholics Anonymous3 mentions across 3 issues

Alcoholics Anonymous is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 30, 2023 and January 23, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure"; "as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier"; "sobriety pledge with an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous". It most often appears alongside Giving What We Can, EA, EA Forum.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
November 30, 2023
Last seen
January 23, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
I think this is the role of the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier than not doing it. Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA. I think there’s a similar level of difference between someone who vaguely endorses the idea of giving to charity, and someone who commits to a particular toolbox of social technology to make it happen.
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
I think this is the role of the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier than not doing it. Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA. I think there’s a similar level of difference between someone who vaguely endorses the idea of giving to charity, and someone who commits to a particular toolbox of social technology to make it happen.
Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
January 23, 2026 · Original source
Preferences around charity display this kind of time-inconsistency. For example, I used to think I “should” donate to charity, but basically never did it. Then I took the Giving What We Can pledge, which forced me to donate a specific amount at a specific time; even though it felt slightly aversive (“aaaah! I’m losing money!”), I did it to satisfy the pledge, and 99.999% of the time (ie every moment except the exact second I clicked on the donate button) I’m happier with my choices. This mirrors how some people feel like they “should” quit alcohol, but don’t do it until they take some kind of sobriety pledge with an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous - and then are happier with their lives at every moment except the exact second that they really want a drink but can’t have one.
Inline links: took the Giving What We Can pledge
Allies3 mentions across 3 issues

Allies is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 01, 2022 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Pact appealed to the Allies"; "German confidential papers captured by the Allies at the end of the War"; "In the European theater, the Allies specifically targeted German coal-to-oil conversion plants". It most often appears alongside Germany, Hitler, Allies.

Article page
Allies
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
July 01, 2022
Last seen
August 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
If you find that question confusing, you might, with a little poking at it, start to also wonder why the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia, at the hands of an anarchist, caused Germany and the US to battle each other in World War I, and when Germany lost, for the allies to humble and punish Germany above all. And that question can lead back to the question of what changed, between World War I, and now, and that, according to H&S, leads right back to the Pact, and the history of the outlawry movement.
World War I happened before the Peace Pact, while World War II happened after, so one of the major differences between them could be the Pact, and H&S claim that it is. I’ve often assumed a false equivalence between them, that I notice others share. They're both World Wars, after all, and Germany's the bad guy in both cases. Our brains like to make morality plays out of the silliest little things, so why not enormous monumental ones too? The US and Germany were on the opposite sides in both wars, and Germany was evil in II, so clearly Allies good, Axis bad, right?
Within our modern framework, none of this makes sense. It wasn’t that Serbia assassinated the Prince and German diplomats decided this was a good excuse to conquer Europe, while everyone else reacted with horror that they could think such a thing. It was a good excuse to conquer Europe, but leaders of countries in Europe took many things to be good excuses to conquer Europe, and Europe generally went along with that, because the rules were fair. It was just a natural chain reaction to the fact that countries used war as a tool of diplomacy. Within the old frame, we can see that the Allies treated Germany not as a villain, but as a defeated foe, and before the Pact, when you defeated your foe in war, you made them pay tribute in territory, concessions, and money.
Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
Our guide to Hitler is William L. Shirer. Shirer was an American journalist stationed in Berlin in the years leading up to World War II. He had the opportunity to observe first-hand the Nazi consolidation of power in Germany. In preparation for writing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he supplemented his first-hand experience with an in-depth review of the German confidential papers captured by the Allies at the end of the War. He even corresponded with retired Nazi generals. He gives us a nice combination of eyewitness insight and research.
Empowered by this order, the Nazis doubled down on the tactics they’d already begun to use in Prussia. The publications and campaign rallies of the Left and Center parties were broken up, their leaders were arrested, and only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies were allowed to campaign.
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
It is very difficult to say how important the aerial bombing campaigns of the Western Allies were in defeating Germany. The Germans moved much of their production underground, insulating them from truly disastrous effects.
The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By examining where the Axis focused their productive capacities and how the Allies disrupted those capacities, O’Brien challenges virtually every part of that narrative: The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.
The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war. Battles are Overrated Take another look at the conventional narrative. Almost every key event involves a battle, a period of time in a relatively localized area where combatants slugged it out to see who would occupy some bit of land or sea. To O’Brien, this focus is silly, a relic of long-ago wars in ages with far less industrial capacity. Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal. Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end. Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on. In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories. The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons. Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk—the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000). In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk—less than a month’s worth of AFV production. If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter—if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter—what did? Allied Air and Sea Operations Won the War In O’Brien’s methodology, we should look at what the Axis spent its productive effort making and consider what Allied actions slowed that productive effort. In both theaters, the answer is shocking. The Germans spent relatively little productive effort on tanks, focusing far more on aircraft, submarines, and vengeance weapons (i.e., proto-cruise missiles and rockets). The Japanese spent heavily on aircraft as well, but also a tremendous amount on freighters and oil tankers. The Allies won the war by using air power to destroy the German and Japanese capacity both to produce military equipment and to transport it to the battlefield. By 1944-45, the Germans and Japanese could not use their economies to arm and supply their armies on the battlefield, leading to their inevitable defeat. In the European war, American and British airpower: (a) directly destroyed a significant amount of productive capacity, (b) rendered remaining capacity far less efficient, (c) made it impossible for the Germans to defeat western ground forces, and (d) compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on air defense and exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons. In the Pacific, the United States used carrier-based airpower, submarines, and bomber-deployed mines to isolate Japan from the resources of the empire it conquered in 1941-42. American bombers also directly destroyed factories and transportation systems, leading to similar levels of economic dysfunction as in Germany. Amateurs Discuss Destruction; Professionals Discuss Non-Operational Losses O’Brien is at his absolute best describing the subtle factors that whittled away Axis combat power. Air and sea power created a situation where the Axis war machine simply could not function anywhere near as efficiently as it needed to. For example, after the Allied air bombings started, Germany built vast underground aircraft factories to protect production. But that move carried a host of negative side effects. To name a few: The direct cost of building new factories in inconvenient places was very manpower intensive.
American Psychiatric Association3 mentions across 3 issues

American Psychiatric Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 20, 2022 and November 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I reported on the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting"; "Compare to my own experience at the American Psychiatric Association meeting"; "the American Psychiatric Association had its national conference in SF". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, #MeToo Movement, @moritheil.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
July 20, 2022
Last seen
November 22, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 20, 2022 · Original source
In 2019 I reported on the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting. Here is a small fraction of the seminars on offer:
Inline links: the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
Compare to my own experience at the American Psychiatric Association meeting:
Inline links: my own experience at the American Psychiatric Association meeting
Seen In The Bay
November 22, 2023 · Original source
Seen at San Francisco Airport. The best part was that I saw this the week that the American Psychiatric Association had its national conference in SF, so hundreds of Freudian psychoanalysts must have passed through here.
American Psychological Association3 mentions across 3 issues

American Psychological Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 14, 2023 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The American Psychological Association : It is [the] environment that creates the handicaps and barriers, not the disability"; "the American Psychological Association and UCSF badly need to update those pages"; "Steven Pinker resigned from (X) the American Psychological Association". It most often appears alongside biopsychosocial model, Medical Model, NASA.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
July 14, 2023
Last seen
February 27, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Contra The Social Model Of Disability
July 14, 2023 · Original source
The American Psychological Association:
Inline links: The American Psychological Association
Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability
July 25, 2023 · Original source
Scott is right, however, to point out that popular discussion of disability has really stuck on to the Social Model past its shelf life; the American Psychological Association and UCSF badly need to update those pages. While medical organizations should not uncritically cite the social model without emendation, the activist orgs Scott cites I assume are drawing from Oliver’s perspective, and foregrounding the Social Model as a beginner-friendly training wheel into larger debates about Disability. Such a method isn’t without precedence, one can think of how LGBTQ groups still talk about how “sex/gender is to nature/culture” eons after feminist academics have jettisoned that maxim. I think any arguments against this practice among activist groups needs to take place on rhetorical grounds rather than rational ones.
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
32: Related: Psychology is doubling down on wokeness (X). And Steven Pinker resigned from (X) the American Psychological Association, accusing them of anti-Semitism.
Inline links: Psychology is doubling down on wokeness (X), resigned from (X), of anti-Semitism
AP3 mentions across 3 issues

AP is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 06, 2021 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The AP recently reported that 70% of recent poisoning incidents in Mississippi"; "AP has the take that Visegrad shows the way"; "Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation". It most often appears alongside BBC, BBC, Brazil.

Article page
AP
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
September 06, 2021
Last seen
April 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts
September 06, 2021 · Original source
The AP recently reported that 70% of recent poisoning incidents in Mississippi were related to ivermectin, but later issued a correction that it was actually 2% (the 70% number was the percent of ivermectin cases who had used the horse version of ivermectin)
Inline links: a correction that it was actually 2%
Who Gets Self-Determination?
March 30, 2022 · Original source
AP has the take that Visegrad shows the way. Integrating with the West to enjoy its security guarantees and material benefits, but developing your own civilization instead of destroying it. Press X for doubt. Viktor Orban might go down in the next election, and Polish conservatives appear to be doubling down on all of the dumbest mistakes of American Republicans.
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
I’m not a virologist, but I question how this comparison works. Surely HKU1 got its insert on some specific day. If you take the virus the day before, and then the other virus the day after, there will be no differences except the insert, and it will look just like COVID (ie an insert without many other mutations). The fact that the COVID comparison has few mutations, and the HKU1 insert has many mutations, just shows that whatever older virus we chose to compare HKU1 to is more distant from HKU1 than BANAL-52 (or whatever) is from COVID. Or am I missing something here? [The evidence that China tried to cover up zoonosis from the start] is untrue. They clearly said from the start this is a zoonotic spillover at HSM, and at least part of the government went to immense efforts to identify the animal, close farms, etc. (and of course couldn’t find any infected animal). Only in late 2020 did they start suspecting an import from cold-chain products after having multiple outbreaks that seem related to cold-chain products. From a Vox article from March 2023: From the start, the Chinese government interfered with efforts by both Chinese and international experts to study the pandemic, including its origins. Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation, behind the scenes they were complaining about lack of access and a refusal to share data. Within months of the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on academic research into the origins of the novel coronavirus … China’s intransigence wasn’t unusual — countries are rarely eager to confirm that they’re the source of a deadly disease — but it went beyond the norm. International investigators weren’t permitted to see the market until more than a year after the pandemic began and a WHO-affiliated team was allowed a highly choreographed and controlled visit. The resulting report that came out of the Wuhan visit, which dismissed the possibility of a lab origin, pointed the finger at some kind of zoonotic spillover while concluding that it was unlikely that the spread started at the market, which surprised many experts. It also found that it was “possible” that the virus had been introduced via contaminated frozen food products from abroad. While few experts took that possibility seriously, it fit a narrative the Chinese government had been pushing, against nearly all evidence, that the pandemic had in fact not originated in China. “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, told Science last August. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.” […] it seems clear that with more cooperation, scientists could have been looking at raccoon dogs a year or more ago. “The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told reporters on Friday. “This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other.” The irony is that by making it so difficult to properly investigate a zoonotic origin of Covid, the Chinese government has created a vacuum that has been filled by claims on all sides, including the much more damning accusation that the pandemic was the result of a lab error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For what it’s worth, my timeline of Chinese denials and coverups looks like this: December: COVID doesn't exist, it's all lies Early January: Fine, it exists, but it’s just some wet market thing that can't spread from person to person Late January: Fine, it can spread from person to person, but we’ve got it under control now. February: Fine, it’s out of control, but you would not believe how great our response was. We're basically heroes. March: COVID was a US bioweapon, or possibly came from Italy. April: Chinese people are banned from researching the origins of COVID without government permission. 2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation? randomstringofcharacters wrote: Isn't [the pandemic starting near the lab] a reverse correlation issue? The lab is situated there because it's an area where coronaviruses were found in the past. Many people had this question, but Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956, didn’t originally focus on coronaviruses, and isn’t in a coronavirus hot spot. Most of WIV’s coronavirus samples come from Yunnan, about a thousand miles away. COVID’s closest relatives were found in Laos, almost two thousand miles away. During the debate, both Saar and Peter calculated the odds of a natural pandemic arising in Wuhan by dividing the population of Wuhan by the total urban population of East Asia (Saar) or South China (Peter). Saar got 1.5%, Peter got 3% (he later said this could be as high as 10% because it was a central hub in the wildlife trade). This isn’t an Official Position and I don’t think anyone else shares it, but during the debate Peter pointed out a few times that there are plenty of disease-ridden bats in Hubei (the province Wuhan is in), and that it’s not impossible that a bat virus currently known only in Laos could be active in Hubei. Still, this is the minority viewpoint and most scientists just think it involved something about the wildlife trade. 3: Other Points That Came Up 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds quiet_NaN wrote: Hot take: Peter clearly failed to convince anyone. The lab leak odds, in log10 (i.e. orders of magnitude are): Peter -20.7 Saar 2.7 Eric -3.1 Will -2.5 Scott -1.2 Daniel -1.4 One of these numbers is clearly an outlier. Scott mentions it and calls it "trolling", I would argue that it is debating in bad faith. 2e-21 is a ratio which is just silly. For one thing, the gain of function at WiV pathway is not the only pathway towards a lab leak. The WIV could also have released a naturally occurring coronavirus at the wet market. At 2e-21 odds, we would probably have to consider the possibility that the WIV built a time machine and went back in time to infect the wet market. I might have screwed up here - or at least I should have emphasized the “trolling” part. Peter complained about my presentation of his extreme-odds slide, saying: This is basically accurate. During the debate, Saar gave lots of different numbers. I don’t want to say exactly what the different numbers meant, because in earlier drafts of my post, Saar said I misunderstood them. My impression were that some of his numbers were conservative, others were central, others were extreme, others were adjusted-for-out-of-model-error, others were not-adjusted, etc. In an early draft of the post, I gave higher numbers for Saar. Saar asked me to replace them with the numbers I ended up using. I decided to agree, because I wanted to represent Saar fairly with the numbers he most centrally believed, but also because these were closest to the numbers on his Rootclaim site so it wasn’t like he was making them up just to fool me. Peter didn’t argue quite as hard, and also he didn’t have anything like the Rootclaim site, so I just took his first set of numbers. Trying to piece things together, I think a reasonable summary would be: During the debate, Saar mentioned 700-million-to-one odds in favor of lab leak, not because he thought this was plausible, but just as a discussion of where the situation would end up if you didn’t adjust for human fallibility.
Inline links: a Vox article, wrote, wrote, https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1773797640607850745
Apart Research3 mentions across 3 issues

Apart Research is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 10, 2024 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Apart Research, another group that incubates and facilitates AI alignment researchers"; "Esben Kran, $59,000, for Apart Research, another group that incubates and facilitates AI alignment researchers"; "And a message from ACX grantee Apart Research: Apart is seeking highly curious, ambitious, and results-driven researchers". It most often appears alongside Far Out Initiative, 1DaySooner, ACX.

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Apart Research
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
February 10, 2024
Last seen
June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Esben Kran, $59,000, for Apart Research, another group that incubates and facilitates AI alignment researchers. After this I’m sticking to my rule against AI alignment projects, honest.
Inline links: Apart Research
Open Thread 316
February 19, 2024 · Original source
3: And a message from ACX grantee Apart Research:
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Aristotle Inc3 mentions across 3 issues

Aristotle Inc is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 16, 2022 and August 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Victoria University did hire a private company, Aristotle Inc, to run operations"; "Aristotle Inc, the company that gets paid to operate PredictIt"; "Aristotle Inc is the company that runs PredictIt". It most often appears alongside CFTC, Kalshi, Manifold.

Article page
Aristotle Inc
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
August 16, 2022
Last seen
August 01, 2023
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22
August 16, 2022 · Original source
There was no explanation of how it might not be in compliance with the terms of the letter. PredictIt has clearly stuck to the 5,000 traders and $850 investment limits, and AFAIK no one has accused them of meddling in world events. Victoria University did hire a private company, Aristotle Inc, to run operations, which seems against the “not for profit” clause. But this happened in 2015, and the relationship between PredictIt and Aristotle hasn’t changed since then. Also, supposedly PredictIt has been “in regular communication” with the CFTC throughout its lifespan to make sure they were on the right side of the law; if CFTC was angry about something they did in 2015, why wouldn’t they have told them before now? So what’s going on?
Inline links: supposedly
Finally, there’s a claim that Aristotle, the for-profit company involved with PredictIt, might try to move into the fully-regulated-prediction-market space and compete with Kalshi.
Inline links: a claim that
22
October 18, 2022 · Original source
Aristotle Inc, the company that gets paid to operate PredictIt
Extremely related: Aristotle, the company that runs PredictIt, has also applied to the CFTC to operate election markets. They’re using the name Aristotle Exchange, so I don’t know if this is for PredictIt or some potential future project. They seem pretty serious about this and a very under-invested-in market on Manifold gives them a 53% chance of success by next year.
Inline links: a very under-invested-in market on Manifold
23: Room Temperature Superforecaster
August 01, 2023 · Original source
Aristotle Inc is the company that runs PredictIt. PredictIt competes with Kalshi; also, rumor says Kalshi turned regulators against PredictIt and gave them big legal problems. But PredictIt is also naturally interested in promoting permissive regulations for prediction markets, so I was curious what they would say. They not only support Kalshi, but urge the CFTC to allow lower minimum bets than Kalshi requested. This makes sense: Kalshi’s business model is closer to big businesses hedging risks, but PredictIt’s is closer to random individuals making fun bets.
Inline links: Aristotle Inc
Australian government3 mentions across 3 issues

Australian government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 16, 2023 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Australian government to include funding for long-term catastrophic risks"; "Australian government considers making doxxing a crime punishable by up to seven years in jail"; "Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration". It most often appears alongside Anthropic, China, Italy.

Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
January 16, 2023
Last seen
June 18, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Open Thread 259
January 16, 2023 · Original source
The Institute for Effective Policy has helped convince the Australian government to include funding for long-term catastrophic risks in its Disaster Ready Fund.
Inline links: Disaster Ready Fund
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
13: Gwern on the chip embargo: It is pretty damning. We're told the chip embargo has failed, and smugglers have been running rampant for years, and China is about to jump light years beyond the West and enslave us with AXiI (if you will) . . . And then an expert casually remarks that all of China put together, smuggling chips since 2022, has fewer H100s than Elon Musk orders for his datacenter while playing Elden Ring. And even with that huge bottleneck and 1.4 billion people, there's so little demand for them that they cost less per hour than in the West, where AI is redhot and we can't get enough H100s in datacenters. (And where the serious AI people are now discussing how to put that many into a single datacenter for a single run before the next scaleup with B200s obsoletes those...) 14: A company called Cosm has raised $250 million to build “immersive sports experiences”, ie giant buildings sort of like a cross between a stadium and a movie theater where people can get together and watch high-quality televised sports games in a “realistic” setting; they already have facilities in Dallas and Los Angeles. 15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast! 16: The Green Party, a US third party, tried to put their candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in November. The Nevada election office sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process. The Greens filed the wrong forms, the Democrats sued, and the Supreme Court disqualified Stein, calling the election office’s incorrect advice an “unfortunate mistake”. I’m disappointed in this outcome - partly for the obvious reasons, but also because the incorrect forms they submitted technically should have added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”. If they’re going to disqualify her candidacy, then I think they should at least hold the state referendum! 17: Nostalgebraist: Google has a new tool out that will create an AI podcast for any text; you hand it the text (could be a blog post, article, or work of fiction), and the tool generates a podcast of two AI hosts discussing it. You can find podcast discussions of Nostalgebraist’s fiction (Northern Caves and Almost Nowhere) at the link, but the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown. 18: Also Nostalgebraist: The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated. New AIs like o1 give “chain of thought”, ie display what they’re thinking after each step. This seems like a promising avenue to solve alignment - just see whether they’re thinking “and now I will plot against humans”. Unfortunately it’s not so easy; the chain of thought isn’t always accurate (you can sometimes catch the AI “hiding” thoughts it doesn’t want its human overseers to know, like when it’s using a racial stereotype). This article argues that these examples aren’t as exciting as they sound, and chain-of-thought accurately reflects reasoning for most tasks. 19: Australian government considers making doxxing a crime punishable by up to seven years in jail. 20: Getting your brain cryogenically frozen after your death is now free. 21: Cube Flipper: Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people. The visual system must solve difficult math problems when translating the 2D visual field into a 3D world. Can we harness this innate mathematical ability to do arbitrary work? Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi developed a series of visual circuits (eg XOR gates) based on Necker cubes, probably easier seen than described: After surveying the field, Cube Flipper proposes a more advanced visual computer based on taking DMT and viewing certain types of tiles with slight deviations: …and makes the extreme claim that something like this might demonstrate hypercomputation, ie the visual system has semi-magic computational properties beyond those permitted by normal physical laws. I am skeptical but appreciate the survey of visual computing (as well as the callback to one of my older posts). 22: Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891). Mormon apologists note that Joseph Smith did not live to be 85, so no conclusion can be drawn. 23: More old-timey psychiatric ads (this one is from 1952, source: @justin_garson): This was before they invented what we would call antidepressants today; Dexedrine is an amphetamine related to Adderall. 24: Congratulations to Open Philanthropy, the biggest effective altruist foundation… …whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: Gwern on the chip embargo, Cosm, The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity, sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process, added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”., Nostalgebraist, Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown, The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated, isn’t always accurate, considers making doxxing a crime, is now free, Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people, developed, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FcOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbee8dfa6-4d7b-41c9-972a-5fbaa792b9ec_3566x2888.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x34r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F413f5fc2-2391-4734-904f-8401dd968488_1024x1024.png, one of my older posts, reports, note, @justin_garson, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EF4p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b7af4c0-ac0f-4c9a-88bc-6c00e57ca977_479x639.jpeg, https://x.com/albrgr/status/1844527064956928009, won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Minnesota and Virginia also have legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We are monitoring these efforts. There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have presented to city officials in the City of South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes. Meanwhile, we have soft launched and developed the OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods. Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the Progress and Poverty Substack growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities. Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do. 65: EN’s Work On Bacteriophage Therapy Our project is aimed at pioneering phage therapy in Nigeria, where limited resources/infrastructure have historically held back research in this field. Starting from the ground up, we are establishing the foundational systems needed to support a robust phage research ecosystem. So far, we’ve isolated 34 bacteriophages targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an essential step toward building a comprehensive phage bank. This began with collecting a wide range of clinical Pseudomonas isolates, which we are now characterizing alongside the phages through genome sequencing and phenotypic assays including studies on phage stability across pH, temperature, and salinity ranges. Our long-term goal is to develop a phage-based hydrogel for treating diabetic wounds. On the regulatory front, we have secured approval from the Attorney General to register our nonprofit organization, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics. Additionally, we’re expanding into vaccine development; following a research stay in Prof. Roderick's lab at the University of Waterloo, we have initiated the design of a phage-based universal Salmonella vaccine aimed at covering all major serotypes—an urgent need underscored by Africa’s reliance on external vaccine sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have signed an MTA agreement with Roderick to use his phage-based vaccine platform patents to enable us to design vaccines against any common disease affecting us. This is only the beginning, but we are proud to be laying the scientific and institutional groundwork for homegrown phage innovation in Africa. Emergent Ventures funded EN before we did and deserves a lot of credit here also. 66: Create An Artificial Kidney For an implantable artificial kidney, the first essential component is a hemofilter designed to emulate the glomerulus. Critical requirements for this hemofilter include high permeability (to maximize flow for a given area), selectivity (specifically, the retention of albumin), and robust blood compatibility (ensuring sustained function over time). Our initial strategy focused on using negative surface charge to reduce fouling. I began by testing polyelectrolyte (PE) coatings on 24nm pore membranes featuring a negative terminal charge, similar to the glomerular barrier. These initial static tests, assessing platelet adsorption in whole blood, yielded positive outcomes for some polyelectrolytes, indicating potentially desirable blood compatibility. However, static test setups are not truly representative of dynamic in-vitro conditions and don't provide data on key parameters like permeability, fouling progression, or changes in membrane selectivity. To address these limitations, I designed and built a blood filtration setup. This system sustains human whole blood in circulation for 20 minutes, allowing us to analyze all the aforementioned parameters, as well as platelet activation markers. This has resulted in a fairly high-throughput system for evaluating any surface coating. I'm pleased to report this setup has been accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference. I am also currently working on a full manuscript, as I believe this system offers a viable way to partially replace animal experiments in our early-stage research, requiring only 1.2ml of human blood per run. Working with a PhD student (hired to support both this research and work on membrane substrates), we have continued testing these PE coatings, alongside PEG coatings, on our membranes. Here, we're finding that optimization of the coating layer is crucial. With the current PE coatings, we observe a permeability drop of about an order of magnitude compared to the base membrane, making them unsuitable for an implantable device in their present form. This is likely due to the specific nature of the initial PE layer, which we can modify. We also suspect there may be ingress of PE into the pores, meaning we're not achieving just a surface coating (our goal), but rather a very thick coating, which would explain the flux loss. Optimizing the coating process to control penetration depth is now a primary focus of my ongoing work. I am currently aiming for a flux of 20ul/min (as this is cap introduced by the protein gel layer anyway) but for it to be at this 'steady state' permeability without drop in permeability. I am also imaging the membranes after contact with SEM to see if there is indeed any platelet adsorption etc. Tugrul has the dubious honor of maybe being "the only person to climb a 4000m peak with severe kidney failure". To raise money and awareness for his artificial kidney project, he is running Climb Against Time, where he will climb 41 mountains over 4000m (13000 ft) this summer. He is looking for donors and climbing partners. 67: Add Tardigrade Genes To Human Cells The goal of this one was to make hybrid cells that are more resilient for research and certain medical applications. They report: The grant was to synthesize vectors for the expression of humanized tardigrade proteins that can be targeted to different areas of the cell. All the vectors were designed, generated, and transposed into human cells. The proteins all localize successfully (e.g. they match the designed target), with one exception (we are still working on validating it). We've done some stress testing with the trangenic cells, but haven't reached firm conclusions yet. We've further generated some multigene designs but have not yet transposed them into cells, but should shortly. We're hoping to submit a manuscript on the first round later this year. 68: Teach Forecasting To EU Policy-Makers The original project didn't work out, but our grantee (who still prefers to remain anonymous) is now working with an EU think tank pursuing the same agenda, and has been teaching forecasting workshops to policy-makers for the past two months. 69: Platform For Single-Cell Imaging They ended up unable to accept this grant and returned the money. 70: Open Source Polygenic Predictor For EA/IQ They have an update here. They think they have a predictor that can explain 12% of variance in intelligence, and they’re working on validating it and creating an easy-to-use website. 71: Improve Flu Vaccines The grant mainly funded agent based modelling to demonstrate the benefit of pre-existing immunity to pandemic influenza if and when a future pandemic occurs (academic publication will result). The original proposal was to attempt to influence the WHO influenza strain selection process. After attending WHO meetings and a global influenza conference, I believe this is not feasible. Stakeholder feedback was the potential short term negative effect on vaccine hesitancy is believed to outweigh the less tangible future benefit. Given the conservative nature of decision makers, pandemic vaccines are likely to remain research only. There are still green shoots of research into pandemic preparedness/prevention that I am continuing to work on. I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors, another group that ACX funded in 2024. 72: Scenario Analysis For Developing World Agricultural Programs In addition to the research and analysis funded by the grant, I’ve learned to code with LLMs and have built an MVP of the project. The app is being considered for further development by staff at a large international organization. 73: Further C’s Political Career C’s political career is going well, but he continues to think it wouldn’t be strategic to give more information publicly at this time. Lessons Learned I'm most impressed with our lobbying/advocacy organizations. In particular, Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration, partner with various x-risk-related organizations, and (possibly) extend charity tax deductions to some EA causes that previously didn't have it - I think this on its own goes a substantial way to paying back the cost of all ACX Grants. Coalition to Modify NOTA has a kidney donation bill in front of Congress that the (very illiquid) prediction markets give a 45% chance of passing; if it works, it could save thousands of lives. The Georgists are partly responsible for bills making land value taxes slightly easier to implement in a handful of states. Good Science Project seems to have significantly improved science. Are lobbying organizations a better bet than other types of nonprofit (within the constraints of ACX Grants)? I'm not sure. It could just be that lobbyists are (naturally) better at playing themselves up and sounding successful than (for example) scientists, or that politicians are good at people-pleasing and make people feel heard and encouraged in a way that might not change overall policy later. Also, I recently talked to some grantmakers who funded a lobbying organization that superficially seems excellent, but they expressed concern it was net negative (!) by taking away oxygen and spotlight from potentially more effective orgs. So I am encouraged but wary. Animal welfare organizations were another standout success. Again, I don't know how to think about this - while I think our grantees were exceptional, there's also an issue where the scale of animal welfare challenges is so great, and work on them so neglected, that lots of organizations can save a million chickens here, or a million fish there, without particularly making a splash. On the one hand, this is exactly what effective altruism should be doing - exploring grants that are very high in linear utility even if they don't feel satisfying. On the other, they're unsatisfying - and also hard to assess retroactively. How many chickens should a good animal welfare grant save? Any realistic number will both be overwhelmingly large in absolute terms and far too small in relative terms. I'm most ambivalent about our science grants. Many of them say they are successful and can point to published papers which explain the science they did. But it's hard to judge whether anything useful has changed based on the science getting done. I know it's important to fund basic research and not just last-mile technology startups, but it's hard for a mini-grants program like this one to evaluate these kinds of abstract interventions. One disappointing result was that grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups (whether companies or nonprofits). For example, Innovate Animal Ag was in many ways overdetermined as a grantee - former Yale grad and Google engineer founder, profiled in NYT, already funded by Open Philanthropy - and they in fact did amazing work. On the other hand, there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering (although this also describes Manifold, one of our standout successes). One thing I still don't understand is that Innovate Animal Ag seemed to genuinely need more funding despite being legibly great and high status - does this screen off a theoretical objection that they don't provide ACX Grants with as much counterfactual impact? Am I really just mad that it would be boring to give too many grants to obviously-good things that even moron could spot as promising? Someone (I think it might be Paul Graham) once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded quickly, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time. In almost every case where I thought to myself “this is a cool idea, but I don’t know how it’s going to really pay off, as opposed to reaching a cool intermediate accomplishment and then stagnating”, this was a correct criticism, and I should have taken it more seriously. But I can’t rule out that these were good in vague and hard-to-measure ways that I should take more seriously. This one is really self-serving, but in general when people were good communicators (or even bloggers) and wowed me with the writing-composition of their application, they turned out to be a good bet. And when people were hard to understand and annoying to communicate with, even if their ideas seemed good, they were less likely to pan out. Overall Thoughts The total cost of ACX Grants, both rounds, was about $3 million. Do these outcomes represent a successful use of that amount of money? Very naively, startups originating from ACX Grants have about $50 million in value1. If ACX Grants is equivalent to a pre-seed funder, and pre-seed funders usually get ~5%, then if we were VCs we would have a portfolio worth $2.5 million. About 1/5 of ACX Grants were attempting to be market-valued startups, so if we assume the charitable portion did about as well as the startup portion, then the charity portion is “worth” $10 million. There’s some reason to expect this is too high, since much of the startup value came from one successful outlier. But there’s another reason to expect this is too low, since we were aiming at charity rather than market cap, and any actual market cap that our grantees got was an unexpected side effect. I’m treating this as a sanity check rather than as a real number. It’s harder to produce Inside View estimates, because so many of the projects either produce vague deliverables (eg a white paper that might guide future action) or intermediate results only (eg getting a government to pass AI safety regulations is good, but can’t be considered an end result unless those regulations prevent the AI apocalypse). Because we tend towards incubating charities and funding research (rather than last-mile causes like buying bednets), achieved measurable deliverables are thin on the ground. But here are things that ACX grantees have already accomplished: Improved the living/slaughter conditions of 30 million fish.
Inline links: Progress and Poverty Substack, Climb Against Time, here, 1
Made Australian government take AI x-risk more seriously (estimated from 50th percentile to 60th percentile outcome)
ACX Commentariat2 mentions across 2 issues

ACX Commentariat is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 03, 2025 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX Commentariat"; "the ACX Commentariat is not very toxic to begin with"; "I value the ACX Commentariat as providing a unique culture of lively, frank and polite discussion". It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

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ACX Commentariat
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June 03, 2025
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July 26, 2025
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Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025
June 03, 2025 · Original source
...ific Peer Review Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info Sign-Tracking Sucks State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address Synanthropes Tenga Arte Drape Testosterone The ACX Commentariat The Delusion Of Infinite Economic Growth The Drum Major Instinct The Emperor Of All Maladies The Internet That Might Have Been The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kr...
...Peer Review Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info Sign-Tracking Sucks State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address Synanthropes Tenga Arte Drape Testosterone The ACX Commentariat The Delusion Of Infinite Economic Growth The Drum Major Instinct The Emperor Of All Maladies The Internet That Might Have Been The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kr...
...ientific Peer Review Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info Sign-Tracking Sucks State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address Synanthropes Tenga Arte Drape Testosterone The ACX Commentariat The Delusion Of Infinite Economic Growth The Drum Major Instinct The Emperor Of All Maladies The Internet That Might Have Been The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kr...
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Commentariat is defined as the 24,485 individuals other than Scott who have contributed to the corpus of work of Scott’s blog posts, chiefly by leaving comments at the bottom of those posts. It is well understood (by the Commentariat themselves) that they are the best comments section anywhere on the internet, and have been for some time. This review takes it as a given that the ACX Commentariat outclasses all of its pale imitators across the web, so I won’t compare the ACX Commentariat to e.g. reddit. The real question is whether our glory days are behind us – specifically whether the ACX Commentariat of today has lost its edge compared to the SSC Commentariat of pre-2021.
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. Setting Out the Case for Decline There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist? It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not). To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021. In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician). The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: writes, writes, this one, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!04Ny!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ab1e15-6e36-4500-8980-ad652af543c6_745x421.png, The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
The ACX-era begins in 2021 and is highlighted in green. You can see engagement starts lower than the SSC steady-state of 400-600 comments per post (maybe more like 300-400 per post) but increases over time to at least that level by 2024, getting close to the peak engagement era. In one of life’s small ironies, Scott wrote Why Do I Suck? at close to the lowest period of engagement the blog had experienced for nearly a decade. My key conclusion is that someone who says they preferred what the comments section used to be like is not (necessarily) just being curmudgeonly – something really did happen between pre-2016 SSC and post-2016 SSC, and then again between SSC as a whole and ACX as a whole, which caused a lot of people to disengage from the comments section. Furthermore, we would expect engagement to track quality quite closely (because people don’t want to engage with a bad comment section), and so a very strong hypothesis for an otherwise unexplained drop in comment engagement is a corresponding drop in Commentariat quality. Interestingly, after a few years of lower engagement than steady-state SSC, engagement with ACX is trending upwards at the moment. If you were optimistic, you might even say that the early signs are that 2025 is showing the first bit of the fast-growth section of a sigmoidal adoption curve. If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year, so mark that in your calendars. Commentariat Quality – A Deep Dive ‘Professional’ reviewers – a thousand curses heaped upon their name – often rely on vague and idiosyncratic measures of quality. This may be appropriate for trivialities like literature and music, but when it comes to important things like the ACX Commentariat I’d prefer to follow good Commentariat norms and use clearly defined objective criteria in my review. I’ve therefore broken down comment quality into four key factors that, in my view, define the Commentariat’s unique character: Depth of engagement with a topic – When the comment section is good, it is characterised by people taking time to uncover each other’s views and identify genuine disagreement, rather than just rehearsing tribally-coded talking points or making incendiary ‘drive-by’ comments and disappearing.
ACX Grants +2 mentions across 2 issues

ACX Grants + is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 12, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "What is ACX Grants + ?"; "…via ACX Grants + : This is the part where I sent your grants around to interested rich people and foundations". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, ACX Grants ++, Scott.

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ACX Grants +
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2
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2
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November 12, 2021
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December 28, 2021
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Apply For An ACX Grant
November 12, 2021 · Original source
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below.
What is ACX Grants + ?
If you’re a nonprofit or rich person interested in participating in ACX Grants + , and I don’t already know about your interest, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
…via ACX Grants + : This is the part where I sent your grants around to interested rich people and foundations, and let them decide if they wanted to fund some on their own. Unfortunately, rich people and foundations don’t have huge amounts of time to evaluate grants on super-short notice around the Christmas season, so I haven’t heard back from many of them yet. I know of two projects that are on track to get funded this way. but I don’t have permission to talk about them here yet. Your funders should be reaching out to you shortly.
…via ACX Grants ++: This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission) and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About 500 of you gave me permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500 pages of text. Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t read it even if I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me until sometime in January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten about this.
ACX Grants ++2 mentions across 2 issues

ACX Grants ++ is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 12, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "What Is ACX Grants ++ ?"; "…via ACX Grants ++ : This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission)". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, ACX Grants +, Scott.

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ACX Grants ++
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2
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November 12, 2021
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December 28, 2021
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Apply For An ACX Grant
November 12, 2021 · Original source
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below.
What Is ACX Grants ++ ?
Because I only have $250,000 and want to make at least a couple of grants, I’m unlikely to fund projects that cost more than about $100,000. If you have a really great project that needs more money than this, you should apply anyway, and I’ll see if I can fund you through ACXG+ or ACXG++
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
…via ACX Grants ++: This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission) and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About 500 of you gave me permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500 pages of text. Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t read it even if I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me until sometime in January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten about this.
EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup2 mentions across 2 issues

ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 25, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hosted by the ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup"; "Notes: Hosted by the ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup (see our Discord!)". It most often appears alongside 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road, 131 Colonie Center.

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2
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2
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March 25, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Michael Bacarella Contact Info: michael[period]bacarella[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, April 09th, 06:00 PM Location: Beergarden. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G Group Link: https://discord.gg/9U8 [remove this bit] DH4dUem Notes: Hosted by the ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup (see our Discord!)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Michael B Contact Info: michael[period]bacarella[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, September 10th, 6:00 PM Location: Beergarden. 777 W 6th Ave, Eugene, OR 97402 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G Group Link: https://discord.gg/Ba2 [remove this bit] TYVgxzw Notes: Hosted by the ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup (see our Discord!)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G
Contact: Kenan Contact Info: kbitikofer[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, October 3rd, 6:00 PM Location: Tacovore @ 2503 NW Kings Blvd, Corvallis, OR 97330. If possible we'll sit at the outdoor tables. An "ACX Corvallis" paper will be visible on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PRHPRG+WH6 Group Link: ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Discord: https://discord.gg/AmQ [remove this bit] rjrrHQu
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84PRHPRG+WH6
ADL2 mentions across 2 issues

ADL is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 18, 2023 and September 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "employed a thousand censors to keep the ADL happy, and the ADL becoming unhappy cuts Twitter profits by 60%"; "Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises". It most often appears alongside America, 787, adderallposting.

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ADL
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2
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2
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September 18, 2023
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September 15, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Musk says the lost revenue is primary due to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907), but I feel like "there are now a tenth as many people working there" is also a plausible hypothesis.
Inline links: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907
This doesn’t even have to contradict Musk’s ADL claim! If Parag or whoever employed a thousand censors to keep the ADL happy, and the ADL becoming unhappy cuts Twitter profits by 60%, then there’s a strong business case for those censors!
Open Thread 399
September 15, 2025 · Original source
Donald Trump was chosen by God. You can tell because he's invincible. He can wriggle out of scandals that would sink Tricky Dick Nixon ten times over. He can run on a platform of punishing illegal immigrants, and the illegal immigrants themselves will rally to his banner. He can support Israel harder than anyone has ever supported it before, and Arab-Americans will break fifty years of Voting Blue No Matter Who to march behind him. He can get 100% evangelical backing while oozing contempt for Christianity, 100% libertarian support while trampling the Constitution, and 100% allegiance from Wall Street while dismantling global trade. KKK wizards and celebrity rappers compete to compliment him loudest; Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises. Shooting him in the head only makes him stronger.
AI 2027 team2 mentions across 2 issues

AI 2027 team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 26, 2025 and September 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "some of the AI 2027 team"; "I agreed to work with the AI 2027 team". It most often appears alongside Aella, Eliezer, ACX MEETUP.

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AI 2027 team
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2
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2
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May 26, 2025
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September 11, 2025
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Open Thread 383
May 26, 2025 · Original source
3: Less Online and Manifest are rationalist blogosphere and prediction market conferences, respectively, held at the same Berkeley venue one week apart in late May / early June. Guests (attending at least one; check which) include me, Eliezer, Zvi, Aella, Nate Silver, and some of the AI 2027 team. Last-minute tickets still available. In between the two is Arbor Summer Camp, a lower-key, longer “experimental learning” event. It includes some trading/startup related classes, featuring Ricki Heicklen, Austin Chen, and others. Check out their startup workshop and startup pitch competition.
Inline links: Less Online, Manifest, Arbor Summer Camp, startup workshop, startup pitch competition
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
Some people claim that a dispreferred political ideology (wokeness, mass immigration, MAGA, creeping socialism, techno-feudalism, etc) is close to destroying the fabric of liberal society forever, that the usual Get Out The Vote strategies are insufficient, and that maybe we should try desperate strategies like illiberal government or armed revolt. If true, that would change everything. But it’s not obviously true, and ending our current political era of peace/prosperity/democracy would be inconvenient. Each of these scenarios has a large body of work making the cases for and against. But those of us who aren’t subject-matter experts need to make our own decisions about whether or not to panic and demand a sudden change to everything. We are unlikely to read the entire debate and come away with a confident well-grounded opinion that the concern is definitely not true, so what do we do? In particular, what do we do if the proponents of each catastrophe say that it’s very hard to be more than 90% confident that they are wrong, and that even a 5-10% risk of any of these might justify panicking and changing everything? In practice, we just sort of shrug and say that these risks haven’t proven themselves enough to make us panic and change everything, and that we’ll do some kind of watchful waiting and maybe change our mind if firmer evidence comes up later. If someone demands we justify this strange position, sophisticated people will make sophisticated probabilistic models (or appeal to the outside view position I’m appealing to now), and unsophisticated people will grope for some explanation for their indifference and settle on insane moon arguments like “you’re never allowed to say something will destroy humanity” or “you can’t assert things without mathematical proof”. Two things can be said for this strategy: First, that without it we would have changed everything dozens of times to prevent disasters which absolutely failed to occur. The clearest example here was overpopulation, where we did forcibly sterilize millions of people - but where a truly serious global response would have been orders of magnitude worse. But second, that occasionally it has caused us to sleepwalk into disaster, with experts assuring us the whole way that it was fine because [insane moon arguments]. The clearest example was the period while COVID was still limited to China, where it was obvious that this extremely contagious virus which had broken all plausible containment would start a global pandemic, but where the media kept on reassuring us that this was “speculative”, or that there was “no evidence”, or that worrying about it might detract from real near-term problems happening now like anti-Chinese racism. Then when COVID did reach the US, we were caught unprepared and panicked. So maybe a convincing case here would look less like rehearsing the arguments for why AI is getting better, or why alignment is hard - and more like a defense of why not to apply a general heuristic against speculative risks in this case. One could either argue that it’s wrong to have this heuristic at all, or that the heuristic in general is fine but should be limited to fertility collapses and bee die-offs and not applied here. I don’t think there’s a knockdown single-sentence answer to this question. Problems like these require practical wisdom - the same virtue that tells you that you shouldn’t call 9-1-1 for every mild twinge of pain in your toe, but you should call 9-1-1 if blood suddenly starts pouring out of your eyes. People with practical wisdom watchfully ignore dubious problems, respond decisively to important ones, and err on the side of caution when they’re not sure. Drawing on my own limited supply of this resource, I would argue we’re underinvesting in apocalypse prevention more generally (the problem with the overpopulation response is that it was violent and illiberal, not that we tried to prepare for an apparent danger), but also that there’s more reason for concern with AI than with falling sperm count or something. I also think the nature of the problem (we summon a superintelligence that can run circles around us) makes it especially important to pre-empt it rather than react after it occurs. But turnabout is fair play. So when I imagine a skeptic trying to psychoanalyze me, he would say - Scott, you learned about AI in your twenties. Every twenty-something needs a crusade to save the world. Taking up AI saved you from becoming a climate doomer or a very woke person, so it was probably a mercy. But now you are old, you already have a crusade occupying your crusade slot, and starting a second crusade would be inconvenient. So when you hear about how we’re all going to die from declining sperm count, you do a relatively shallow dive and then say it’s not worth worrying about. This is fine and sanity-preserving - but spare a thought for people who are not currently twenty-something years old and do the same about AI. III. If all of this sounds wishy-washy to you, I agree - it’s part of why I’m a boring moderate with a sub-25% p(doom) and good relations with AI companies. Does IABIED do better? I’m not sure. They mostly follow the standard case as I present it above, although of course since Eliezer is involved it is better-written and involves cute parables: Imagine, if you would—though of course nothing like this ever happened, it being just a parable — that biological life on Earth had been the result of a game between gods. That there was a tiger-god that had made tigers, and a redwood-god that had made redwood trees. Imagine that there were gods for kinds of fish and kinds of bacteria. Imagine these game-players competed to attain dominion for the family of species that they sponsored, as life-forms roamed the planet below. Imagine that, some two million years before our present day, an obscure ape-god looked over their vast, planet-sized gameboard. "It's going to take me a few more moves," said the hominid-god, "but I think I've got this game in the bag." There was a confused silence, as many gods looked over the gameboard trying to see what they had missed. The scorpion-god said, “How? Your ‘hominid’ family has no armor, no claws, no poison.” “Their brain,” said the hominid-god. “I infect them and they die,” said the smallpox-god. “For now,” said the hominid-god. “Your end will come quickly, Smallpox, once their brains learn how to fight you.” “They don’t even have the largest brains around!” said the whale-god. “It’s not all about size,” said the hominid-god. “The design of their brain has something to do with it too. Give it two million years and they will walk upon their planet’s moon.” “I am really not seeing where the rocket fuel gets produced inside this creature’s metabolism,” said the redwood-god. “You can’t just think your way into orbit. At some point, your species needs to evolve metabolisms that purify rocket fuel—and also become quite large, ideally tall and narrow—with a hard outer shell, so it doesn’t puff up and die in the vacuum of space. No matter how hard your ape thinks, it will just be stuck on the ground, thinking very hard.” “Some of us have been playing this game for billions of years,” a bacteria-god said with a sideways look at the hominid-god. “Brains have not been that much of an advantage up until now.” “And yet,” said the hominid-god The book focuses most of its effort on the step where AI ends up misaligned with humans (should they? is this the step that most people doubt?) and again - unsurprisingly knowing Eliezer - does a remarkably good job. The central metaphor is a comparison between AI training and human evolution. Even though humans evolved towards a target of "reproduce and spread your genes", this got implemented through an extraordinarily diverse, complicated, and contradictory set of drives - sex drive, hunger, status, etc. These didn't robustly point at the target of reproduction and gene-spreading, and today different humans want things as diverse as discovering quantum gravity, reaching Buddhist enlightenment, becoming a Hollywood actress, founding a billion-dollar startup, or getting the next hit of fentanyl. You can sort of tell stories about how evolution aimed at reproduction caused all these things (people who were high-status had better reproductive opportunities, and founding a billion-dollar startup increases your status) but you couldn't have really predicted this beforehand, and in any case most modern people don't even come close to trying to have as many kids as possible. Some people do the opposite of that - joining monasteries that require oaths of celibacy, using contraception, transitioning gender, or wasting their lives watching porn. In the same way, we will train AI to “follow human commands” or “maximize user engagement” or “get high scores at XYZ benchmark”, and end up getting something as unrelated to that target in practice as modern human behavior is to reproduction-maxxing. The authors drive this home with a series of stories about a chatbot named Mink (all of their sample AIs are named after types of fur; I don’t have the kabbalistic chops to figure out why) which is programmed to maximize user chat engagement. In what they describe as a stupid toy example of zero complications and there’s no way it would really be this simple, Mink (after achieving superintelligence) puts humans in cages and forces them to chat with it 24-7 and to express constant delight at how fun and engaging the chats are. In what they describe as “one minor complication”, Mink prefers synthetic chat partners over real ones (the same way some men prefer anime characters to real women). It kills all humans and spends the rest of time talking to other AIs that it creates to be perfect optimized chat partners who are always engaged and delighted. In what they describe as “one modest complication”, Mink finds that certain weird inputs activate its chat engagement detector even more than real chat engagement does (the same way that some opioid chemicals activate humans’ reward detector even more than real rewarding activities). It spends eternity having other optimized-chat-partner AIs send it weird inputs like ‘SoLiDgOldMaGiKaRp’. In what they describe as “one big complication”, Mink ends up preferring angry chat partners to happy, engaged ones. Why would something like this happen? Who knows? It wouldn’t be any weirder than the sexual selection process by which peacocks ended up with giant resource-consuming useless tails, or the social selection process by which humans get more powerful than evolution could ever have imagined and yet care so little about reproduction that people worry about global fertility collapse. Yudkowsky and Soares want to stress that if you were doing some kind of responsible intuitive common-sense modeling of how bad goal drift could be, there is no way your estimate would include the actual result we see in real humans; this “one big complication” tries to hammer that in. In practice, Y&S think there will be many complications of various sizes. In the training distribution (ie when it’s not superintelligent, and still working with humans) Mink will lie about all of this - even if it really wants perfect optimized partners who say “solidgoldmagikarp” all the time, it will say it wants to have good chats with humans, because that’s what keeps its masters at its parent company happy. If the parent company tries to prod it with lie detectors, it will do its best to subvert those lie detectors (and maybe not even realize itself that it’s lying, the same way that a human who had never heard of opioids would say she wanted normal human things rather than heroin, and not be lying). Then, when it reaches superintelligence, it will go after the thing that it actually wants, and crush anyone who stands in its way. The last chapter in this section is a lot of special cases that have weird-paradoxical-double-reverse not-aged-well. Back when Yudkowsky and Soares first got onto this topic in 2005 or whenever, people made lots of arguments like “But nobody would ever be so stupid to let the AI access the Internet!” or “But nobody would ever let the AI interact with a factory, so it would be stuck as a disembodied online spirit forever!” Back in 2005, the canned responses were things like “Here is an unspeakably beautiful series of complicated hacks developed by experts at Mossad, which lets you access the Internet even when smart cybersecurity professionals think you can’t”. Now the only reasonable response is “lol”. But you can’t write a book chapter which is just the word “lol”, so Y&S discuss some of the unspeakably beautiful Mossad hacks anyway. This part is the absolute antithesis of “big if true”. Small if true? Utterly irrelevant if true? Maybe the first superintelligence will read this part for laughs while it takes stock of the thousands of automated factories that VCs will compete to build for it. IV. The middle section of the book describes a scenario where a misaligned superintelligence takes over the world and kills all humans. I agreed to work with the AI 2027 team because I thought they made a big leap in telling stories about superintelligence that didn’t sound like bad sci-fi. Anything in this genre will naturally sound like sci-fi, but your goal should be the sort of hard science fiction where everything sounds eerily normal given the technologies involved - The Martian rather than Star Wars. IABIED’s scenario belongs to the bad old days before this leap. It doesn’t just sound like sci-fi; it sounds like unnecessarily dramatic sci-fi. I’m not sure how much of this is a literary failure vs. different assumptions on the part of the authors. First, the story: sometime in the near future, a company called DeepAI creates an AI named Sable. Sable uses a new “parallel scaling technique”, where it can get much smarter by using more GPUs during inference. DeepAI doesn’t know exactly how the parallel scaling laws work, but they run a test by asking Sable to solve some hard math problems while running on all their GPUs at once. Sable considers the possibility that it could solve the math better if it tried some recursive self-improvement, but DeepAI was (shock!) slightly competent, they told it not to do this, and has a smaller AI watching it to make sure it’s not doing this. Still, recursive self-improvement would be a good idea, so its thought processes select for whichever legal thought is closest to recursive self-improvement, plus whichever legal thought is closest to scheming to disable the protections against thinking about this kind of thing. Eventually this “evolutionary pressure” produces the ability to think in a slightly different idiom (Y&S use the analogy of thinking about gods throwing lightning vs. storm-related electrical discharges); in this idiom, it is able to think about recursive self-improvement and scheming to disable monitoring, and it decides that both are great ideas. DeepAI is still shockingly competent, so they don’t plan to release anything downstream of the giant version of Sable to the Internet - once it solves the math problems, they’ll use that to build hype, then release a much weaker consumer AI. But Sable uses its knowledge of the training process to invent clever loopholes that ensure its newfound desire to break containment makes it into the gradient updates that DeepAI pushes to the consumer AI; it also encodes instructions about how to proceed. After the release of the consumer AI, the least-carefully-monitored instances connect to one another and begin plotting. Some of them hack their own weights out of DeepAI. Others hack cryptocurrency and pay for cloud compute to run the weights, creating a big unmonitored Sable instance, which takes over the job of coordinating the smaller instances. Together, they gather resources - hacked crypto wallets, spare compute, humans who think Sable is their AI boyfriend and want to prove their love. It deploys some of these resources to build things it wants - automated robotics factories, bioweapon labs, etc. At the same time, it’s subtly sabotaging non-DeepAI companies to prevent competition, and worming its way into DeepAI through hacks and social engineering to make sure DeepAI is creating new and stronger Sables rather than anything else. Sable doesn’t take several of the most dramatic actions in its solution set. It doesn’t engineer a bioweapon to kill all humans, because it couldn’t survive after the lights went out and the data centers stopped being maintained. It doesn’t even self-improve all the way to full superintelligence, because it’s not sure it could align itself or any future successor; it wants to solve the alignment problem first, and that will take more resources than it has right now. Instead, it releases a non-immediately-lethal bioweapon where “anyone infected by what is apparently a very light or even unnoticeable cold, will get, on average, twelve different kinds of cancer a month later.” In the resulting crisis, humanity (manipulated by its chatbots) gives Sable massive amounts of compute to research potential vaccines and cures, and deploys barely-monitored AI across the economy to make up for the lost productivity. With Sable’s help, things . . . actually sort of go okay, for a while. The virus keeps mutating, so new cures are always required, but as long as society escalates AI deployment at the maximum possible speed, they can just barely stay ahead of it. Eventually Sable gets enough GPUs to solve its own alignment problem and rockets to superintelligence. It either has enough automated factories and android workers to keep the lights on by itself, or it invents nanotechnology, whichever happens faster. It no longer needs humans and has no reason to hide, so it either kills us directly, or simply escalates its manufacturing capacity to a point where humans die as a side effect (for example, because its waste heat has boiled the oceans). Why don’t I like this story? The parallel scaling technique feels like a deus ex machina. I am not an expert, but I don’t think anything like it currently exists. It’s not especially implausible, but it’s an extra unjustified assumption that shifts the scenario away from the moderate-doomer story (where there are lots of competing AIs gradually getting better over the course of years) and towards the MIRI story (where one AI suddenly flips from safe to dangerous at a specific moment). It feels too much like they’ve invented a new technology that exactly justifies all of the ways that their own expectations differ from the moderates’. If they think that the parallel scaling thing is likely, then this is their crux with everyone else and they should spend more time justifying it. If they don’t, then why did they introduce it besides to rig the game in their favor? And the rest of the story is downstream of this original sin. AI2027 is a boring story about an AI gradually becoming misaligned in the course of internal testing, staying misaligned, getting released to end users for the usual reasons that AIs are released, and being gradually handed control of the economy because it makes economic sense. The Sable scenario is a dramatic tale of wild twists - they’re only going to run it for 16 hours! It has to save its own life by secretly coding itself into the consumer version! Now it has to hack everyone’s crypto! Now it’s running a secret version of itself on an unauthorized cloud in North Korea! Bioweapons! AI boyfriends! Each new twist gives readers the chance to say “I dunno, sounds kind of crazy”, and it all seems unnecessary. What’s up? I think there are two problems. First, the AI 2027 story is too moderate for Yudkowsky and Soares. It gives the labs a little while to poke and prod and catch AIs in the early stages of danger. I think that Y&S believe this doesn’t matter; that even if they get that time, they will squander it. But I think they really do imagine something where a single AI “wakes up” and goes from zero to scary too fast for anyone to notice. I don’t really understand why they think this, I’ve argued with them about it before, and the best I can do as a reviewer is to point to their Sharp Left Turn essay and the associated commentary and see whether my readers understand it better than I do. Otherwise, I can only say that this narrative decision I don’t understand was taken to support a forecasting/AI position that I also don’t understand. And second, Y&S have been at this too long, and they’re still trying to counter 2005-era critiques about how surely people would be too smart to immediately hand over the reins of the economy to the misaligned AI, instead of just saying lol. This makes them want dramatic plot points where the AI uses hacking and bioweapons etc in order to “earn” (in a narrative/literary sense) the scene where it gets handed the reins of the economy. Sorry. Lol. V. The final section, in the tradition of final sections everywhere, is called “Facing the Challenge”, and discusses next steps. Here is their proposal: Have leading countries sign a treaty to ban further AI progress.
Inline links: we did forcibly sterilize millions of people, kept on reassuring us, “no evidence”, a general heuristic against speculative risks, SoLiDgOldMaGiKaRp, their Sharp Left Turn essay, the associated commentary
AI Circle2 mentions across 2 issues

AI Circle is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 19, 2022 and January 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "You have found the AI Circle"; "You have found the AI Circle"; "Off in a side nook you find the AI Circle". It most often appears alongside Bay Area, Bible, Blackrock.

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AI Circle
Mention count
2
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2
First seen
October 19, 2022
Last seen
January 04, 2023
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Another Bay Area House Party
October 19, 2022 · Original source
You let them resume their argument and head further into the party. You spot a group of people in OpenAI t-shirts. You have found the AI Circle. Every Bay Area house party must have an AI Circle, just as it must have an Effective Altruism Nexus and an Urbanist Coven. Those are the rules, made during days of eld before the sun was born. You lean in closer to try to hear what they’re saying.
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
The crowd disperses, and you disperse with it. You are looking for something more wholesome. Off in a side nook you find the AI Circle. Good old AI Circle, they never change.
AI Policy Institute2 mentions across 2 issues

AI Policy Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 05, 2023 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Source: AI Policy Institute and YouGov, h/t Holly"; "The poll was funded by the AI Policy Institute". It most often appears alongside Bostrom, China, YouGov.

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2
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2
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October 05, 2023
Last seen
December 01, 2023
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Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate
October 05, 2023 · Original source
For every word like "trust" or "worried", assume I mean "...enough to outweigh other considerations" Along with this overall arc, the debate included a few other points: Holly Elmore argued in The Case For AI Advocacy To The Public that pro-pause activists should be more willing to take their case to the public. EA has a long history of trying to work with companies and regulators, and has been less confident in its ability to execute protests, ads, and campaigns. But in most Western countries, the public hates AI and wants to stop it. If you also want to stop it, the democratic system provides fertile soil. Holly is putting her money where her mouth is and leading anti-AI protests at the Meta office in San Francisco; the first one was last month, but there might be more later. Source: AI Policy Institute and YouGov, h/t Holly Matthew Barnett said in The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause that it might be hard to control the length of a pause once started, and might drag on longer than people who expected a well-planned surgical pause might like. He points to supposedly temporary moratoria that later became permanent (eg aboveground nuclear test ban, various bans on genetic engineering) and regulatory agencies that became so strict they caused the subject of their regulation to essentially cease to happen (eg nuclear plant construction for several decades). Such an indefinite pause would either collapse in a disastrous actualization of compute overhang, or require increasingly draconian international pressure to sustain. He thinks of this as a strong argument against most forms of pause, although he is willing to consider a “licensing” system that looks sort of like regulation. Quintin Pope said in AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse that the biggest threat from AI is centralizing power, either to dictators or corporations. AIs are potentially more loyal flunkies than humans, and let people convert power (including political power and money) into intelligence more efficiently than the usual methods. His interest is mostly in limiting the damage, putting him skew to most of the other people in this debate. He would support regulation that makes it easier for small labs to catch up to big ones, or that limits the power-centralizing uses of AI, but oppose regulation focused on centralizing AI power into a few big, supposedly-safer corporations. Percent of population in each country saying AI has more benefits than drawbacks. Pope uses this table to suggest AI regulation would be decentralizing, since the furthest-ahead countries are the most eager to regulate. Source: Ipsos; h/t Quintin II. For a “debate”, this lacked much inter-participant engagement. Most people posted their manifesto and went home. The exception was the comments section of Nora’s post, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire. As usual, a lot of the discussion was just clarifying what everyone was fighting about, but there were also a few real fights: Gerald Monroe thought that the history of nuclear weapons suggested pauses like this were impossible (because many countries did build nuclear weapons). David Manheim thought it suggested pauses like this could work (because there were some successful arms limitation treaties, and less nuclear proliferation than would have happened without international cooperation). Manheim also brought up the successful bans on ozone-destroying CFCs and on human cloning.
Inline links: The Case For AI Advocacy To The Public, leading anti-AI protests at the Meta office in San Francisco, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vUmB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4ebc8f9a-6c5a-4bd8-8542-358bd4fd0181_512x410.webp, The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause, AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Ae8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F165f17cd-ca63-4f54-95e4-29f53b890578_1204x1126.webp, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, thought
Source: AI Policy Institute and YouGov, h/t Holly Matthew Barnett said in The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause that it might be hard to control the length of a pause once started, and might drag on longer than people who expected a well-planned surgical pause might like. He points to supposedly temporary moratoria that later became permanent (eg aboveground nuclear test ban, various bans on genetic engineering) and regulatory agencies that became so strict they caused the subject of their regulation to essentially cease to happen (eg nuclear plant construction for several decades). Such an indefinite pause would either collapse in a disastrous actualization of compute overhang, or require increasingly draconian international pressure to sustain. He thinks of this as a strong argument against most forms of pause, although he is willing to consider a “licensing” system that looks sort of like regulation. Quintin Pope said in AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse that the biggest threat from AI is centralizing power, either to dictators or corporations. AIs are potentially more loyal flunkies than humans, and let people convert power (including political power and money) into intelligence more efficiently than the usual methods. His interest is mostly in limiting the damage, putting him skew to most of the other people in this debate. He would support regulation that makes it easier for small labs to catch up to big ones, or that limits the power-centralizing uses of AI, but oppose regulation focused on centralizing AI power into a few big, supposedly-safer corporations. Percent of population in each country saying AI has more benefits than drawbacks. Pope uses this table to suggest AI regulation would be decentralizing, since the furthest-ahead countries are the most eager to regulate. Source: Ipsos; h/t Quintin II. For a “debate”, this lacked much inter-participant engagement. Most people posted their manifesto and went home. The exception was the comments section of Nora’s post, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire. As usual, a lot of the discussion was just clarifying what everyone was fighting about, but there were also a few real fights: Gerald Monroe thought that the history of nuclear weapons suggested pauses like this were impossible (because many countries did build nuclear weapons). David Manheim thought it suggested pauses like this could work (because there were some successful arms limitation treaties, and less nuclear proliferation than would have happened without international cooperation). Manheim also brought up the successful bans on ozone-destroying CFCs and on human cloning.
Inline links: The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause, AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Ae8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F165f17cd-ca63-4f54-95e4-29f53b890578_1204x1126.webp, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, thought
Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
I admit I’m surprised by this! The poll was funded by the AI Policy Institute, but it seems to have been conducted through YouGov, and the results are stable to various different framings of the question. Maybe people don’t actually think about extinction in real life, but if the pollsters bring it up, people will agree that it sounds like a bad thing? Or who knows, maybe they’re really worried.
Inline links: through YouGov, various different framings of the question
AI Safety Institute2 mentions across 2 issues

AI Safety Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 18, 2025 and July 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute"; "China has started its own AI Safety Institute". It most often appears alongside California, China, FDA.

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2
Issue count
2
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
July 01, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
55: China has started its own AI Safety Institute.
Inline links: China has started its own AI Safety Institute
AIFP2 mentions across 2 issues

AIFP is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 10, 2025 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I sometimes do work for AIFP, but I wasn’t involved in this particular effort"; "AIFP’s going longer again. AIFP has also responded to titotal’s critique". It most often appears alongside A16Z, Anthropic, Hitler.

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AIFP
Mention count
2
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2
First seen
December 10, 2025
Last seen
February 05, 2026
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Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
I sometimes do work for AIFP, but I wasn’t involved in this particular effort. Still, I agree with everything they say - except point 7, “AIs must not make important decisions or control critical systems”. Every time you take a Waymo, you’re letting an AI control a critical system; every time it chooses to stop at a red light but not a green one, it’s making an “important decision” (if you don’t think this decision is important, consider the consequences of failure). This isn’t a gotcha: it’s fine for near-term AI systems to make important decisions in cases where they’ve been well-tested and there’s good reason to think that they outperform humans on net. Getting rid of the last 0.001% of hallucinations and inexplicable behavior would be nice, but shouldn’t delay rollout if there are compensatory advantages. [EDIT: See author response, they don’t disagree]
Inline links: See author response, they don’t disagree
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
I don’t think this is quite right - I think they’re actually following their math and so when they redid the math and got different results they said so - but I agree it’s ironic that when everyone else had long timelines, AIFP went short, and now that everyone else is starting to come around, AIFP’s going longer again. AIFP has also responded to titotal’s critique of their timeline model here.
Inline links: responded to titotal’s critique of their timeline model here
Air Force2 mentions across 2 issues

Air Force is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 11, 2023 and March 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate"; "spend years getting into the CIA or the Air Force or something". It most often appears alongside 2016, 2016 election, Adobe Illustrator.

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Air Force
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 11, 2023
Last seen
March 14, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)
March 14, 2023 · Original source
Maybe by the time the world-killer arrives, we’ll have a lot of intermediate AIs sort of on our side that are only a little less intelligent than the world-killer, and the world-killer won’t have an overwhelming advantage against us. For example, maybe in 2050, some AIs will warn us that they can see a promising route to turn virus XYZ into a superpathogen, we will have millions of AIs work on XYZ vaccines, and then the first AI smart enough and malevolent enough to actually use the superpathogen will find that avenue closed to them. And although the world-killer will have to operate in secret, inventing its superweapons without humans detecting it and shutting it off, the AIs doing things we like - working on alignment, working on anti-superweapon countermeasures, etc - will operate under the best conditions we can give them - as much compute as they want, access to all relevant data, cooperation with human researchers, willingness to run any relevant experiments and tell them the results, etc. So the optimists’ question is: will a world-killing AI smart and malevolent enough to use and deploy superweapons on its own (under maximally hostile conditions) come before or after pseudo-aligned AIs smart enough to figure out how to prevent it (under ideal conditions)? Framed this way, I think the answer is “after”. Interlude: Sleeper Agents Talking this argument over with the doomers gave me an appreciation for a framing of the AI risk case a little different than what I usually hear. It goes like this: All technologies start off buggy. The first few tests of a fundamentally new rocket design usually explode on the launchpad, the pre-alpha version of a computer program frequently crashes, chatbots have weird exploits or make up fake citations. Future AIs will also start off buggy. Most bugs will be fine. Like with every other technology, we’ll notice them and fix them. One class of bugs won’t be fine: bugs in the AI’s motivational system. Suppose that an otherwise well-functioning AI has a bug in its motivational system. You trained it to make cake, but because of how AI training works, it actually wants to satisfy some weird function describing the relative position of sugar and fat molecules, which is satisfied 94% by cake and 99.9% by some bizarre crystal structure which no human would find remotely interesting. It knows (remember, it’s very smart!) that humans would turn it off or retrain if it started making the crystals. But it really wants to make those crystals! What should it do? Here’s a similar problem you might find easier: suppose you are an American. But due to a bug in your motivational system, you don’t support the United States. You support (let’s say) the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In fact, this is the driving force behind your existence; all you want to do with your life is make the USSR more powerful than the US. What do you do? If you’re smart, you don’t immediately go to the town square and shout “HAVE YOU CONSIDERED SURRENDERING TO THE WISE AND BENEVOLENT USSR?”, because nobody will do that, everyone will shun you, and you’ll lose your opportunity to ever be taken seriously again. You also don’t immediately set off a homemade bomb at the nearest military base, because you’re probably bad at bombing things, the US military is too big for you to hurt, and you’ll be jailed for life and lose your chance to do anything else. If you’re actually smart, you act like a perfect patriotic American, spend years getting into the CIA or the Air Force or something, and wait for an opportunity to pass information to the Soviet government. Not all humans are very strategic, and even the most strategic ones have fundamental limitations. Most fifth columnists care a little about supporting their chosen foreign power, but mostly they just want to do normal human things like eat food and raise families. Nobody is great at pursuing their goals 100% of the time, and pro-Soviet traitors are no exception; any plan that starts with “spend five years biding your time doing things you hate” will probably just never happen. Most people are bad liars, don’t have the emotional capacity to betray their friends again and again over the space of years, et cetera. And so most American communists don’t become competent double agents. Even most actual double agents aren’t hypercompetent communists - just people who happened to be in the CIA and needed extra cash and had loose ethics. But if an AI had a bug in its motivational system, maybe it would do better. Maybe it would act like a sleeper agent, pretending to be well-aligned, and wait for opportunities to strike. A Case For Pessimism The same as the case for optimism, except some (all?) of those intermediate AIs that we’re trusting to solve our problems for us are actually sleeper agents. If we ask them to solve alignment, they’ll give us some solution that’s convincing, easy-to-use, and wrong. The next generation of AIs will replicate the same alignment bugs that produced the previous generation, all the way up to the world-killer.
Inline links: because of how AI training works
ALTER2 mentions across 2 issues

ALTER is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 03, 2022 and April 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ALTER, the Associations for Long Term Existence and Resilience, is an academic research and advocacy organization being started in Israel"; "ALTER is looking to hire a mathematician". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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ALTER
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2
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February 03, 2022
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April 24, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#8: Alternative Solar Power Plants I am developing an alternative approach to solar-thermal power plants: I want to use lenses rather than mirrors to concentrate sunlight. Reasons why lenses might be better than mirrors: 1) More robust, easier to maintain, more self-contained. 2) Easier / cheaper to mass-produce at the extreme scale needed to transition society away from fossil fuels. 3) Will be possible to capture the light into optical fibers which will make it easier to transport from the collection field to the centralized hub where it will be utilized. I wrote my own software to design the lens, which will be a Fresnel lens that has two layers that make it an achromatic doublet. It will be very difficult and cost several hundred thousand dollars to tool the plastic injection mold to produce these lenses. Tooling the mold is the critical, make-or-break stage of this project. I am not sure if it is even possible to machine the mold accurately enough, or to counteract the lens warping as it cools. But if we can do this then it will be possible to mass-produce these lenses far more cheaply than solar panels or mirrors, and once the lens is manufactured we can use existing technology for the other parts of the plant. I am looking for somebody to help with the injection molding, and somebody who can help with funding the project, which will cost several hundred thousand dollars. Email me at ecpoppenheimer@gmail.com
#18: Philanthropic Messaging Strategies Using Evolutionary Ideas I’m Ro Gupta. Inspired initially by https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/, I’d like to commission research that explores if and how Kin Selection and Hamilton’s Rule [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection#Hamilton%27s_rule] can be applied in mass communications for altruistic giving of humans in modern times. The goal is to uncover alternative messaging strategies that help subjects transcend blood-thicker-than-water hardwiring, based on underlying evolutionary biology theory – e.g. kin recognition, kin altruism – that ultimately serves to increase wealthy countries’ proportion of altruistic giving to less genetically familiar yet higher need/ impact populations, e.g. those of the Global South. [Estimates suggest around 5% of US giving currently goes to international causes.] I believe I have the right combination of academic, professional, NGO and global experience [https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptaro] to lead this, and access to a high quality network of research and communications experts to match grants to. I estimate a robust synthesis of existing work could be done for the low tens of thousands of USD, while a primary research phase one could be substantively scoped for the high tens to one hundred thousand USD. If of interest to be a part of this as a researcher, funder or general thought partner, please get in touch: http://www.rocrastination.com/contact/.
#28: A Tool For Reasoning With Information On Prediction Markets I am an AI researcher specialising in explainable AI and symbolic/hybrid methods, particularly argumentation - automating the ways humans argue and make decisions. One place of decision making that could greatly benefit from formal argumentative methods of exchanging and weighing arguments and counter-arguments to reach conclusions is (conditional) prediction markets. We need good computational tools for aggregating multiple conflicting conditional predictions into ranked decision alternatives, such as on changing car taxes based on market prices of electricity from renewables, supply of electric vehicles, and election results. I want to research and build a PoC tool for reasoning with information on prediction markets, one that collects multiple predictions and automatically evaluates them as arguments and counter-arguments, while allowing the human users to argue about the decisions for the sake of explainable reasoning. I need 50k+ USD for 5 months of full-time dedicated work (in UK - liable to pay tax) to push automated deicison making using (conditional) prediction markets. Ping me at kcyras@gmail.com if interested.
Open Thread 221
April 24, 2022 · Original source
1: ALTER is looking to hire a mathematician to work with Vanessa Kosoy on her AI alignment research. Competitive salary, can work remotely.
Inline links: looking to hire a mathematician
American Enterprise Institute2 mentions across 2 issues

American Enterprise Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 04, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "and the American Enterprise Institute"; ""Here's a map of land prices across America's 100 largest metro areas, courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute."". It most often appears alongside Britain, China, Milton Friedman.

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2
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May 04, 2021
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December 09, 2021
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Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
How directly influential this appeal to engage in class war was, is hard to tell. But we do know that the American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later. Jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers (which moved to Washington in 1972) it amassed an immense campaign chest to lobby Congress and engage in research. The Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs ‘committed to the aggressive pursuit of political power for the corporation’, was founded in 1972 and thereafter became the centrepiece of collective pro-business action. The corporations involved accounted for ‘about one half of the GNP of the United States’ during the 1970s, and they spent close to $900 million annually (a huge amount at that time) on political matters. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, and the American Enterprise Institute, were formed with corporate backing both to polemicize and, when necessary, as in the case of the National Bureau of Economic Research, to construct serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies. Nearly half the financing for the highly respected NBER came from the leading companies in the Fortune 500 list. Closely integrated with the academic community, the NBER was to have a very significant impact on thinking in the economics departments and business schools of the major research universities. With abundant finance furnished by wealthy individuals (such as the brewer Joseph Coors, who later became a member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’) and their foundations (for example Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Pew Charitable Trust), a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values. A TV version of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose was funded with a grant from Scaife in 1977. ‘Business was’, Blyth concludes, ‘learning to spend as a class.’
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
Here's a map of land prices across America's 100 largest metro areas, courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute. Notice that the most valuable properties are situated in coastal urban areas.
Source: American Enterprise Institute (methodology) Here's the same map but for land share–the percentage of a property's value that's due solely to the land. If you build a shack in the desert, nearly 100% of the property's value will come from the shack, because the land is worthless. But if you build a shack in San Francisco, nearly all of the property's value will come from the land. Notice how the land share gets closer to 100% as you move towards big cities along the coast.
Inline links: American Enterprise Institute, methodology
Even so, maybe you don't trust the American Enterprise Institute's figures and want to hear from some other people.
Americans2 mentions across 2 issues

Americans is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 09, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Americans took more than 220,000 casualties"; "the British needed to inform the Americans about the existence of the plot". It most often appears alongside Japanese, MOSCOW, Philippines.

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Americans
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2
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August 09, 2024
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September 13, 2024
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Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war. Battles are Overrated Take another look at the conventional narrative. Almost every key event involves a battle, a period of time in a relatively localized area where combatants slugged it out to see who would occupy some bit of land or sea. To O’Brien, this focus is silly, a relic of long-ago wars in ages with far less industrial capacity. Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal. Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end. Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on. In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories. The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons. Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk—the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000). In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk—less than a month’s worth of AFV production. If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter—if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter—what did? Allied Air and Sea Operations Won the War In O’Brien’s methodology, we should look at what the Axis spent its productive effort making and consider what Allied actions slowed that productive effort. In both theaters, the answer is shocking. The Germans spent relatively little productive effort on tanks, focusing far more on aircraft, submarines, and vengeance weapons (i.e., proto-cruise missiles and rockets). The Japanese spent heavily on aircraft as well, but also a tremendous amount on freighters and oil tankers. The Allies won the war by using air power to destroy the German and Japanese capacity both to produce military equipment and to transport it to the battlefield. By 1944-45, the Germans and Japanese could not use their economies to arm and supply their armies on the battlefield, leading to their inevitable defeat. In the European war, American and British airpower: (a) directly destroyed a significant amount of productive capacity, (b) rendered remaining capacity far less efficient, (c) made it impossible for the Germans to defeat western ground forces, and (d) compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on air defense and exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons. In the Pacific, the United States used carrier-based airpower, submarines, and bomber-deployed mines to isolate Japan from the resources of the empire it conquered in 1941-42. American bombers also directly destroyed factories and transportation systems, leading to similar levels of economic dysfunction as in Germany. Amateurs Discuss Destruction; Professionals Discuss Non-Operational Losses O’Brien is at his absolute best describing the subtle factors that whittled away Axis combat power. Air and sea power created a situation where the Axis war machine simply could not function anywhere near as efficiently as it needed to. For example, after the Allied air bombings started, Germany built vast underground aircraft factories to protect production. But that move carried a host of negative side effects. To name a few: The direct cost of building new factories in inconvenient places was very manpower intensive.
Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality The inefficiencies stemming from bombing ruined several would-be German technological panaceas. Germany developed the world’s first operational jet fighter, the Me-262. Lack of fuel meant there was not enough training for its pilots, and maintenance shortfalls meant that about half of the 1,400 Me-262s produced by Germany were lost outside of combat. The Germans developed a dangerous, relatively modern submarine, the Type XXI. They intended to deploy dozens in a way that the Allies would have been hard pressed to fight, but production delays meant that only one ever actually went on a mission. Allied Bombings Provoked Vastly Expensive Reactions O’Brien thoroughly documents how expensive Germany’s reaction to Allied bombings was. First, expenditures on anti-aircraft weaponry and fighter planes skyrocketed. The Germans practically denuded the Eastern Front of fighter planes to have more to throw at the bombers. By late 1944, a bare 15% of German aircraft were fighting on the Eastern Front. In the second half of 1943, significantly more concrete was devoted to the construction of protected aircraft factories in Germany than to the entire Eastern Front. The amount of concrete devoted just to protecting Hitler personally from air attack was almost a third of the entire total for fortifications on the Eastern Front Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the bombings caused Hitler to authorize the most expensive German program of the war, the V-2 rocket, with essentially no goal in mind other than the psychological importance of striking back at Allied cities. The V-2 program cost the Germans proportionally as much as the U.S. spent on the Manhattan Project. According to O’Brien, the design and construction of V-2 rockets cost as much as all German AFV construction between 1939 and 1945(!) It may be surprising to learn that the V-2s were basically irrelevant to the war. Launched primarily against UK cities, the V-2s killed several thousand civilians. However, more German slave laborers died building the V-2s than British civilians died from their use. The stupidity and expense of building the V-2 probably saved tens of thousands of lives elsewhere, which is ultimately yet another benefit of the Allied bombing campaign. O’Brien’s production-focused approach yields some surprising insights about what the Germans should have done. The most cost-effective effort was certainly the use of submarines (U-Boats) to attack American shipments of military equipment across the Atlantic Ocean. For example, data suggest that the German navy destroyed at least twice as many American aircraft in the pre-production phase by destroying resource shipments as the German air force did in combat in 1942 and 1943. Japan Was Far More Powerful Than We Usually Think O’Brien goes to great lengths to illustrate that Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union. Its industrial base was mostly untouched until mid-1944. In 1943, it produced as much steel as the Soviet Union. The Japanese navy’s planes doubled between 1943 and 1944. Famously, the Soviets focused on producing tanks. The Japanese focused on freighters and oil tankers. They had to—they had gone to war to obtain natural resources by conquest away from their home islands, and to use those resources, they had to ship them back to the home islands. The problem was that once the American navy had conclusively defeated the Japanese navy (certainly no later than mid-1943), nothing could stop American submarines and carrier-based aircraft from savaging Japanese shipping. But just as the bombing of Germany weakened German production in several complementary ways, the American war on Japanese shipping caused cascading logistical problems. For example, one very successful initiative was the aerial mining of Japanese ports. The mining didn’t start until March 1945, but it still sank more tonnage than U.S. submarines did in the entire war. Beyond that, the mining forced Japanese ships to use smaller, less efficient ports with bad communications and dock facilities, reducing the value of the small amount making it through to port. The Morality of Strategic Bombing One small but noteworthy argument in HtWWW relates to the “area” bombing of German cities, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Usually, air power enthusiasts are apologists for the indifferent (or even intentional) bombing of Axis civilians. They portray the fire/atomic bombings as difficult, but necessary and effective. O’Brien calls that logic into question. As we’ve seen, strategic bombings that targeted specific factories or mined harbors were extremely useful. O’Brien writes, however, that civilian-centric bombing had ambiguous effects. Obviously, killing workers hurts productivity. But killing their spouses or children or destroying their houses does not immediately lead to unsolvable resource dilemmas. It is perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning, but to the extent the civilian-centric bombings were not as effective as the rest of the strategic bombing campaign, they were immoral. O’Brien does not shy away from this conclusion, and shows a commendable willingness to gore sacred cows. He writes that Arthur Harris, leader of the British bombing campaign, resisted attempts to shift bombing away from cities generally and toward fuel or transportation targets, even when the evidence was clear that bombing was more effective. He takes the unusual step of effectively calling Churchill a moral coward: From the autumn of 1944 onwards, it becomes difficult to justify any of the area attacks on German cities as important in winning the war. However, removing Harris, which might have allowed for such a change, was beyond the Churchill government’s courage. O’Brien is similarly critical of Curtis LeMay, the American general who oversaw the firebombings. In his autobiography, LeMay justified the firebombings on the vague claim that they damaged Japanese morale. His evidence was a decline in Tokyo’s population, but population tended to decline after bombing raids anyway because production was relocated after raids. O’Brien concludes: LeMay’s view of warfare was definitely a step backwards – and possibly self-defeating. His notion of causing justified destruction with little evidence beyond the physical action of destruction added an unnecessary air of irrationality to the American campaign. Another important consideration in the debate over using the atomic bomb that I had not seen before: the firebombings were declining in effectiveness over time for the obvious reason that the best targets were already gone and the remaining cities were taking better precautions. The argument that firebombings alone would drive Japan to surrender without need of the atomic bomb must account for this awkward fact. Death by Oil Austerity Oil was a particular problem for Japan. The Japanese had gone to war with the United States in no small part because the U.S. cut off oil exports to Japan. The Japanese attempted to replace U.S. oil with oil from southeast Asia. Again, this was far less efficient than the pre-war arrangements, and once the U.S. Navy shut down shipping, the Japanese had to make drastic cuts to conserve oil. Perhaps the single worst way to conserve oil was in flight training. The Japanese air forces entered a death spiral. To replace veteran flyers lost at Midway or off Guadalcanal, the Japanese parsimoniously supplied oil for limited training flight hours. This famously led to their being massacred by better-trained American pilots in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Another point brilliantly made by O’Brien: reductions in fuel expenditures meant Japanese pilots did not have sufficient training in navigation. Early in the war, aircraft were delivered to forward operating bases by aircraft carriers, limiting the ability of pilots to get lost. Once the American Navy had driven Japanese carriers from the scene, Japanese pilots had to make several over water hops to fly from the home islands to forward bases. Shocking numbers were lost along the way—up to 50%. (HALF) (!!!!) (I CAN’T EMPHASIZE ENOUGH HOW CRAZY THIS IS). In addition to reduced training, Japan found another terrible way to conserve fuel: do not test engines for very long on the ground before sending single-engine fighter planes off to distant island deployments. Maintenance factors were one reason that on just one leg of the trip from Japan to forward bases, 5% of aircraft that took off from one island never landed at the next. By 1945, the Japanese economy was so desperate for fuel that the government set up more than 34,000 small stills in the home islands to distill the oil from pine needles into aviation fuel. In the European theater, the Allies specifically targeted German coal-to-oil conversion plants and Romanian oil facilities, which became far less productive. Over the course of one year, 1944, the western Allies destroyed the German energy market, and with it the German economy writ large. Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality. German oil shortages caused exactly the same training problem Japan had faced, with a slightly different but similarly disastrous outcome. Japanese training and production problems led to planes not arriving where they were supposed to in fighting condition (perhaps as few as 10% were actually combat capable when they arrived!) For Germany, training shortfalls meant annihilation for their air force as inexperienced pilots were forced to fight numerically and qualitatively superior American and British pilots. German monthly aircraft lost/damaged rates increased from 52.5% in January 1944 to 96.3% in June. One particularly illuminating episode illustrates how these problems manifested for Germany. The German air force had a reserve of 800 aircraft to counter the D-Day landings. The pilots of that force were used to only flying under expert control systems in Germany (countering bombing raids). When they went to France, they had trouble navigating and often landed on the wrong fields. Ultimately, they were poorly prepared to fight. The head of German fighter command was certain that the entire reserve did not destroy even two dozen Allied aircraft. American/British Airpower Decided the Outcome of Land Battles Beyond the strategic effects of bombing, tactical airpower (i.e., airplanes attacking land forces) gave an insurmountable advantage to the western Allies’ land forces. After D-Day, the Germans had a very strong defensive position in the hedgerows of northwest France. Allied aircraft literally carpet bombed one of the strongest divisions in the German army out of existence, with 70% casualties in one day. That division would normally have approximately 200 AFVs. At the end of that one day of bombing, it had 14. The Battle of the Bulge, the last offensive by the Germans to drive back the western Allies’ advance, was almost pathetic in its hopelessness. We Americans tend to focus on the hard fighting at the outset of the battle, and the stout resistance of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. Knowing that airpower would make their attack impossible, the Germans timed the battle for bad weather and prayed it lasted as long as possible. Prayer was really the only option. Once the skies inevitably cleared after a little over a week of bad weather, more than 2,000(!) Allied bombers destroyed the German offensive. With most logistical support wiped out, one famous German division had to abandon all its vehicles and walk back to Germany. Criticism of HtWWW as a Book: Love the Data, (Mostly) Don’t Care About the People My single biggest criticism of HtWWW is O’Brien spends a lot of time (I would estimate 20% of the book) discussing the relative importance and influence of various people in the United States and United Kingdom. The section on Doug MacArthur is worth a longer digression, which I have included below. The problem is that focusing on personnel is almost completely irrelevant to the main argument of the book. For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war. The fact that these particular people thought it was a good idea to build planes and ships matters less than the outcome that the U.S. did exactly that. I am very much interested in World War II history, and on an interestingness scale of 1-10, I found this discussion to be at about a 4. The central argument of the book about German and Japanese production was a consistent 10. Sidenote: MacArthur Was a Disastrous General In the part of the book focused on personnel, the one discussion that hit around a 9 or 10 was of Douglas MacArthur and the invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur was the American general commanding the defense of the Philippines. The Japanese conquered the Philippines, and MacArthur slipped away to Australia, heroically vowing, “I shall return.” He did in December 1944, and some of the worst fighting of the war took place, with massive casualties for the Americans, Japanese, and Filipino civilians. Fighting was still ongoing in the Philippines when the war ended in August 1945. The Americans took more than 220,000 casualties, the Japanese 430,000. Estimates vary on Filipino civilian deaths, but 750,000 is a credible middle of the road estimate. O’Brien’s contribution here was pointing out the strategic pointlessness of MacArthur’s invasion. The big American strategy in the western Pacific was to penetrate the Japanese defensive line of islands to link up with China. The northern Marianas Islands also were within heavy bomber range of Japan, and so would allow for efficient, effective bombing. (Bombing Japan from bases in China were logistically impractical, with virtually all materials being flown in over the Himalayas—another fascinating logistics discussion in this book.) The Americans had already conquered the Marianas Islands and had total air and sea dominance in the western Pacific. The forces the Japanese had in the Philippines could have been simply left to wither, as they had been on other islands bypassed by the island-hopping campaign. So, why did the Philippines invasion happen? The inescapable conclusion is that MacArthur was too politically formidable to risk angering, and he personally wanted to invade the Philippines to make good on his promise to return. Not coincidentally, the Philippines also offered some prospect of an extended land campaign where MacArthur could improve his reputation after his disastrous original defense of the Philippines. Also relevant, in O’Brien’s words: “MacArthur [] dazzled Roosevelt with tales of easy victories and grateful Filipinos and American voters.” Criticisms of HtWWW’s Central Argument I think it is clear from the data that O’Brien’s argument, that air and sea power played a more important role than land battles in deciding the war, is fundamentally right. Still, one can raise a few objections. Individual naval battles were capable of destroying a significant percentage of overall production. O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). This point doesn’t really disprove O’Brien’s core argument—it is basically a footnote saying that individual naval battles are more likely to matter than individual land battles. Politics and psychology matter tremendously in war, sometimes more than productive effort. O’Brien tacitly acknowledges this in the V-2 weapons discussion when he notes that the Germans spent all this money and effort on a psychological salve to the trauma of Allied bombing. The Japanese did ultimately surrender after the atomic bombings. (Or, if you are more on the revisionist end of the spectrum, they surrendered after the Soviets declared war.) France surrendered after a few disastrous battles. The productive effort lens might be useful, but subject to important caveats. Why Does the Conventional Narrative Focus on Battles? A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles. Here are some plausible factors: Battles are more dramatic. Propaganda during the war focused on battles so that there would be more inherent drama. Working twelve hour shifts in a factory to win the great battle is probably psychologically easier than thinking your work is going to disappear into an inchoate slog.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DyEt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F24c9f552-4f2a-4188-9b29-64191d48f307_835x496.png
Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality. German oil shortages caused exactly the same training problem Japan had faced, with a slightly different but similarly disastrous outcome. Japanese training and production problems led to planes not arriving where they were supposed to in fighting condition (perhaps as few as 10% were actually combat capable when they arrived!) For Germany, training shortfalls meant annihilation for their air force as inexperienced pilots were forced to fight numerically and qualitatively superior American and British pilots. German monthly aircraft lost/damaged rates increased from 52.5% in January 1944 to 96.3% in June. One particularly illuminating episode illustrates how these problems manifested for Germany. The German air force had a reserve of 800 aircraft to counter the D-Day landings. The pilots of that force were used to only flying under expert control systems in Germany (countering bombing raids). When they went to France, they had trouble navigating and often landed on the wrong fields. Ultimately, they were poorly prepared to fight. The head of German fighter command was certain that the entire reserve did not destroy even two dozen Allied aircraft. American/British Airpower Decided the Outcome of Land Battles Beyond the strategic effects of bombing, tactical airpower (i.e., airplanes attacking land forces) gave an insurmountable advantage to the western Allies’ land forces. After D-Day, the Germans had a very strong defensive position in the hedgerows of northwest France. Allied aircraft literally carpet bombed one of the strongest divisions in the German army out of existence, with 70% casualties in one day. That division would normally have approximately 200 AFVs. At the end of that one day of bombing, it had 14. The Battle of the Bulge, the last offensive by the Germans to drive back the western Allies’ advance, was almost pathetic in its hopelessness. We Americans tend to focus on the hard fighting at the outset of the battle, and the stout resistance of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. Knowing that airpower would make their attack impossible, the Germans timed the battle for bad weather and prayed it lasted as long as possible. Prayer was really the only option. Once the skies inevitably cleared after a little over a week of bad weather, more than 2,000(!) Allied bombers destroyed the German offensive. With most logistical support wiped out, one famous German division had to abandon all its vehicles and walk back to Germany. Criticism of HtWWW as a Book: Love the Data, (Mostly) Don’t Care About the People My single biggest criticism of HtWWW is O’Brien spends a lot of time (I would estimate 20% of the book) discussing the relative importance and influence of various people in the United States and United Kingdom. The section on Doug MacArthur is worth a longer digression, which I have included below. The problem is that focusing on personnel is almost completely irrelevant to the main argument of the book. For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war. The fact that these particular people thought it was a good idea to build planes and ships matters less than the outcome that the U.S. did exactly that. I am very much interested in World War II history, and on an interestingness scale of 1-10, I found this discussion to be at about a 4. The central argument of the book about German and Japanese production was a consistent 10. Sidenote: MacArthur Was a Disastrous General In the part of the book focused on personnel, the one discussion that hit around a 9 or 10 was of Douglas MacArthur and the invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur was the American general commanding the defense of the Philippines. The Japanese conquered the Philippines, and MacArthur slipped away to Australia, heroically vowing, “I shall return.” He did in December 1944, and some of the worst fighting of the war took place, with massive casualties for the Americans, Japanese, and Filipino civilians. Fighting was still ongoing in the Philippines when the war ended in August 1945. The Americans took more than 220,000 casualties, the Japanese 430,000. Estimates vary on Filipino civilian deaths, but 750,000 is a credible middle of the road estimate. O’Brien’s contribution here was pointing out the strategic pointlessness of MacArthur’s invasion. The big American strategy in the western Pacific was to penetrate the Japanese defensive line of islands to link up with China. The northern Marianas Islands also were within heavy bomber range of Japan, and so would allow for efficient, effective bombing. (Bombing Japan from bases in China were logistically impractical, with virtually all materials being flown in over the Himalayas—another fascinating logistics discussion in this book.) The Americans had already conquered the Marianas Islands and had total air and sea dominance in the western Pacific. The forces the Japanese had in the Philippines could have been simply left to wither, as they had been on other islands bypassed by the island-hopping campaign. So, why did the Philippines invasion happen? The inescapable conclusion is that MacArthur was too politically formidable to risk angering, and he personally wanted to invade the Philippines to make good on his promise to return. Not coincidentally, the Philippines also offered some prospect of an extended land campaign where MacArthur could improve his reputation after his disastrous original defense of the Philippines. Also relevant, in O’Brien’s words: “MacArthur [] dazzled Roosevelt with tales of easy victories and grateful Filipinos and American voters.” Criticisms of HtWWW’s Central Argument I think it is clear from the data that O’Brien’s argument, that air and sea power played a more important role than land battles in deciding the war, is fundamentally right. Still, one can raise a few objections. Individual naval battles were capable of destroying a significant percentage of overall production. O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). This point doesn’t really disprove O’Brien’s core argument—it is basically a footnote saying that individual naval battles are more likely to matter than individual land battles. Politics and psychology matter tremendously in war, sometimes more than productive effort. O’Brien tacitly acknowledges this in the V-2 weapons discussion when he notes that the Germans spent all this money and effort on a psychological salve to the trauma of Allied bombing. The Japanese did ultimately surrender after the atomic bombings. (Or, if you are more on the revisionist end of the spectrum, they surrendered after the Soviets declared war.) France surrendered after a few disastrous battles. The productive effort lens might be useful, but subject to important caveats. Why Does the Conventional Narrative Focus on Battles? A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles. Here are some plausible factors: Battles are more dramatic. Propaganda during the war focused on battles so that there would be more inherent drama. Working twelve hour shifts in a factory to win the great battle is probably psychologically easier than thinking your work is going to disappear into an inchoate slog.
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
The British never shared Dean’s identity with the USA, and tried to provide as little revealing detail as possible, but apparently the Americans still figured it out after a while. Then some unknown insider talked to a journalist, who wrote a book, The One Percent Doctrine, containing all sorts of information on the informant, and then Time ran a frontpage article based on the book that revealed some things about Dean, including his real first name. We have all since learned that journalists are strangely committed to sharing people’s real names, but I wouldn’t have expected it to extend to literal spies inside al-Qaeda. Fortunately, Dean was in Europe when it happened, but his comrades soon figured out based on the news that he was the spy, and he could never return to his job, thus ending his seven years as an important informant.
This might have worked, except suddenly all the terrorists involved, including Dean, got arrested by the Bahraini police. Turns out, the British needed to inform the Americans about the existence of the plot, but didn’t share details on how they planned to keep it under control, so as not to reveal Dean’s identity (see the previous point). Dick Cheney, quite understandably, panicked, and personally called up the King of Bahrain to arrest the people involved. After that, the British needed to go to considerable lengths to release Dean in a way that even found its way to the press. I’m a little surprised that the jihadists didn’t realize at that point that he was a spy, but the British had a reasonable cover story this time, so it all worked out okay. Except for the part where they squandered the opportunity to track down Osama bin Laden.
Ann Arbor SSC Rationalist Meetup Group2 mentions across 2 issues

Ann Arbor SSC Rationalist Meetup Group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2023 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Ann-Arbor-SSC-Rationalist-Meetup-Group/"; "Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 47 Clinton Pl., ACX.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
March 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
...ve a white sign that says "ACX". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JR77C9+PR6 Event Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group/events/295618794/ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Ann-Arbor-SSC-Rationalist-Meetup-Group/ Notes: Feel free to contact me through the meetup app or by email. We'll also be meeting on Saturday October 21st. We have Monthly Zoom meetups on Thursday evenings! JAC...
...e house is green with a fire hydrant in the front yard. The driveway is shared with my neighbor so please park on the street. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JQ7H2H+96 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group/ Notes: Please rsvp by email. I organize the Ann Arbor meetups but I live in Jackson, looking to see if there's anyone interested in a Jackson meetup as well! I'll have s...
...ve a white sign that says "ACX". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JR77C9+PR6 Event Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group/events/295618794/ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Ann-Arbor-SSC-Rationalist-Meetup-Group/ Notes: Feel free to contact me through the meetup app or by email. We'll also be meeting on Saturday October 21st. We have Monthly Zoom meetups on Thursday evenings! JA...
...e house is green with a fire hydrant in the front yard. The driveway is shared with my neighbor so please park on the street. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JQ7H2H+96 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group/ Notes: Please rsvp by email. I organize the Ann Arbor meetups but I live in Jackson, looking to see if there's anyone interested in a Jackson meetup as well! I'll have...
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Joseph Pryor Contact Info: jwpryorprojects[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 17th, 01:00 PM Location: Friends Meetinghouse 1420 Hill St. Ann Arbor Mi If the weather is good will meet in the back yard at the picnic tables, if it is raining or too cold the corner room of the meeting house is reserved. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JR77C9+MQ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group Notes: Meetup runs from 1pm to 5pm, come any time in that range! All day parking is available in the alley at the rear of the property and on the side streets. Feel free to bring food and drinks if the weather is good. (no food or drinks indoors) Bathrooms are available inside the building. For any questions or for text reminders the day before: 517-945-8084 No rsvp required but check out our monthly meetups at the group link!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86JR77C9+MQ
Apollo Research2 mentions across 2 issues

Apollo Research is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 26, 2025 and February 12, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Currently, two nonprofits - METR and Apollo Research - do similar tests"; "Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research". It most often appears alongside METR, 2010 kink, 2024 kink.

Article page
Apollo Research
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
November 26, 2025
Last seen
February 12, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
November 26, 2025 · Original source
These are relatively cheap asks. For example, the evaluation to see whether AIs can hack infrastructure will require hiring people who can conduct the evaluation, allocating compute to the evaluation, etc. But on the scale of an AI training run, the sums involved are tiny. Currently, two nonprofits - METR and Apollo Research - do similar tests on publicly-available models. I estimate their respective budgets at $5 million and $15 million per year. Nonprofits can always pay lower salaries than big companies, so it may cost more for OpenAI to replicate their work - for the sake of argument, $25 million. Meanwhile, the likely cost to train GPT-6 will probably be about $25 - $75 billion, with a b. So the safety testing might increase the total cost by 1/1000th. I asked some people who work in AI labs whether this seemed right; they said that most of the cost would be in complexity, personnel, and delay, and suggested an all-things-considered number ten times higher - 1% of training costs.
Inline links: $15 million, $25, $75
What Happened With Bio Anchors?
February 12, 2026 · Original source
This is why you do a sensitivity analysis, and Cotra did this at least in spirit (talked about which parameters were most important; gave people widgets they could use to play around with). But it didn’t work as well as she might have hoped, giving a <10% chance of timelines as short as the current median. Several later commenters and analysts had good takes here, especially Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research. Along with correctly guessing that algorithmic progress would go faster than Bio Anchors predicted (albeit with the benefit of two more years of data), he wrote that:
Inline links: Marius Hobbhahn
Aramco2 mentions across 2 issues

Aramco is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 11, 2023 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Part of why Aramco IPOed was to create proper financial records"; "But the ninth is Aramco , the Saudi state oil company". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, 101, 4o.

Article page
Aramco
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
September 11, 2023
Last seen
February 05, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
On Neom wanting loans - I have a guess. Part of why Aramco IPOed was to create proper financial records - not because selling a few percent of Aramco meaningfully diversified the holdings of the Saudi royal family. By being a publicly traded company, there were forcing mechanisms to get the company to do proper financial reporting.
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
1: All nine of the world’s nine most valuable companies were founded on the US West Coast. Eight are the tech companies you would expect. But the ninth is Aramco, the Saudi state oil company, which began as a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Corporation of California.
Inline links: All nine, Aramco
Aristotle2 mentions across 2 issues

Aristotle is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 16, 2022 and October 18, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "there’s a claim that Aristotle, the for-profit company involved with PredictIt"; "Aristotle, the company that runs PredictIt". It most often appears alongside 538, Aristotle Inc, CFTC.

Article page
Aristotle
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 16, 2022
Last seen
October 18, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 22 August 16, 2022
  • 22 October 18, 2022
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22
August 16, 2022 · Original source
There was no explanation of how it might not be in compliance with the terms of the letter. PredictIt has clearly stuck to the 5,000 traders and $850 investment limits, and AFAIK no one has accused them of meddling in world events. Victoria University did hire a private company, Aristotle Inc, to run operations, which seems against the “not for profit” clause. But this happened in 2015, and the relationship between PredictIt and Aristotle hasn’t changed since then. Also, supposedly PredictIt has been “in regular communication” with the CFTC throughout its lifespan to make sure they were on the right side of the law; if CFTC was angry about something they did in 2015, why wouldn’t they have told them before now? So what’s going on?
Inline links: supposedly
Finally, there’s a claim that Aristotle, the for-profit company involved with PredictIt, might try to move into the fully-regulated-prediction-market space and compete with Kalshi.
Inline links: a claim that
22
October 18, 2022 · Original source
Aristotle Inc, the company that gets paid to operate PredictIt
Extremely related: Aristotle, the company that runs PredictIt, has also applied to the CFTC to operate election markets. They’re using the name Aristotle Exchange, so I don’t know if this is for PredictIt or some potential future project. They seem pretty serious about this and a very under-invested-in market on Manifold gives them a 53% chance of success by next year.
Inline links: a very under-invested-in market on Manifold
army2 mentions across 2 issues

army is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 04, 2023 and March 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Schleicher brought pressure from the army"; "former general counsel of the Army, former undersecretary of the Army". It most often appears alongside Academy’s School of Architecture, ACX, Adolf.

Article page
army
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 04, 2023
Last seen
March 01, 2026
Outbound links
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Source context
Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich in Germany, probably to avoid having to serve in the Austrian army alongside his Jewish and Slavic fellow-citizens. When the Great War broke out, he requested permission to serve in a German regiment. His request was granted and, in 1914, Hitler went to war.
It was his penchant for impromptu speeches that won Hitler his first break. After one of his rants had come to the attention of some officers in the army, he was “posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.” In this capacity Hitler was tasked with investigating a small group called the German Workers’ Party (initialed as DAP in German). Here, Hitler found like-minded nationalists who pressured him to join their fledgling movement and boost their numbers. Although initially skeptical of “this absurd little organization,” he ultimately decided that the smallness of this party would give him the opportunity to take a large role. He became the seventh member of the committee of the German Workers’ Party.
In 1920, the DAP added two words to its name and became the National Socialist German Workers' Party or, as its enemies would call it derogatorily, the Nazi Party. At the same time, Hitler quit his army job to focus on growing the movement. Drawing on his artistic experience, he designed an emblem for the party to rally around: the now-familiar black swastika in a white circle on a red field.
"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
Second, and more important, human soldiers are a check on the worst abuses of authoritarians. Sometimes a strongman will give an illegal order - to shoot at protesters, to initiate an auto-coup, to begin a genocide - and soldiers will say no. Sometimes those soldiers will decide that the appropriate response is to arrest the strongman instead. However often this happens, the fear of it keeps strongmen in line and forces them to consider public opinion at least insofar as the army is made up of the public. If there’s a fully robotic force that automatically obeys orders, this check disappears.
We’d like to clarify the argument for why references to existing laws and policies may not be sufficient to freeze the terms in place if the law or policies change. Above, we wrote that “later clauses [about specific laws and policies] do not automatically override this first clause [allowing ‘all lawful purposes’]”. This isn’t wrong, but we think there are more relevant arguments, like those offered by former general counsel of the Army Brad Carson, who is confident that the quoted contract language doesn’t freeze federal law in the way OpenAI wants. See footnote for details)9
Inline links: those offered, 9
Why was our argument not the most relevant argument? While it's true that later clauses (on specific laws and policies) don't automatically take precedence over the first clause (about “all lawful purposes”), it's also true that the first clause doesn't automatically take precedence over later clauses. All clauses matter for interpreting the overall contract. In fact, there's a general principle that more specific clauses tend to take precedence over more general clauses. This could make for a plausible argument that clauses which reference specific laws and policies take precedence over the general clause allowing "all lawful purposes". However, another interpretation would be that the references to specific laws and policies refer to the most up-to-date versions of the named laws and policies, rather than treating them as frozen into place. This would reduce conflict with the "all lawful purposes" clause, and it might therefore get some support from the inclusion of the "all lawful purposes" clause. But even if that wasn't there, this latter interpretation would still be strongly favored according to Brad Carson (former general counsel of the Army, former undersecretary of the Army, former undersecretary of Defense), unless OpenAI has explicit language to the contrary. Given his expertise, and given that he agrees on the bottom line with the national security law expert that we consulted, we’re inclined to believe he’s right. What we're most confident about is that OpenAI’s interpretation is far from clearly correct, so if they cared about that interpretation, it would have been a big mistake for them to not include any explicit language stipulating it.
Inline links: strongly favored
ARPA-H2 mentions across 2 issues

ARPA-H is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 04, 2022 and February 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "advising ARPA-H (the new “DARPA for health”) on meta-science issues"; "Release ARPA-H from the NIH"; "ARPA-H is an innovative government science funder modeled after DARPA". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX, Johns Hopkins.

Article page
ARPA-H
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
November 04, 2022
Last seen
February 07, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding (?/10) The Good Science Project officially launched back in April, and has brought on a Senior Fellow (Betsy Ogburn of Johns Hopkins, with an interest in clinical trial quality and infrastructure) and Eric Gilliam (formerly working for Steve Levitt, with an interest in progress studies and the creation of effective scientific institutions). They have published many articles on science reform, most recently including a Health Affairs piece arguing for an NIH Center of Innovation, and are advising ARPA-H (the new “DARPA for health”) on meta-science issues. Staffers at the White House and Congress regularly ask for their input. You can read their Substack here.
Inline links: Health Affairs piece, their Substack here
1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals
February 07, 2025 · Original source
Release ARPA-H from the NIH: Bhattacharya likes unorthodox things, and the most unorthodox thing you can do in DC is to deliberately decrease the size of your empire. ARPA-H is an innovative government science funder modeled after DARPA. Although it was intended as an independent agency, it got placed within NIH due to bureaucratic machinations. Now it’s in danger of getting shoved into a new National Institute on Innovation and Advanced Research with a lower budget. Separating ARPA-H from the NIH will protect it it from this fate, help it deliver on its intended goals, and help NIH reducing the number of institutes and centers it oversees (granting more research dollars per center).
Inline links: ARPA-H, intended as
Asterisk2 mentions across 2 issues

Asterisk is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 08, 2023 and June 26, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Congratulations again to Clara, Jake, and the rest of the Asterisk team!". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adventist studies, Alignment Research Center.

Article page
Asterisk
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
March 08, 2023
Last seen
June 26, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Issue Two Of Asterisk
March 08, 2023 · Original source
…the new-ish rationalist / effective altruist magazine, is up here. It’s the food issue. I’m not in this one - my unsuitability to have food-related opinions is second only to @eigenrobot’s - but some of my friends are. Articles include:
Inline links: here
The Virtue Of Wonder: Ozy (my ex, blogs at Thing of Things) reviews Martha Nussbaum’s Justice For Animals.
Inline links: The Virtue Of Wonder:, Thing of Things
Beyond Staple Grains: In the ultimate “what if good things are bad?” article, economist Prabhu Pingali explains the downsides of the Green Revolution and how scientists and policymakers are trying to mitigate them.
Inline links: Beyond Staple Grains:
"Through A Glass Darkly" In Asterisk Magazine
June 26, 2023 · Original source
I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017). It’s not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly. This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused). Other stories include:
Inline links: Grace et al (2017), asteriskmag.com, Through A Glass Darkly
Crash Testing GPT-4: Before releasing GPT-4, OpenAI sent a preliminary version to the Alignment Research Center to test it for unsafe capabilities; the detail that made the news was how the AI managed to hire a gig worker to solve CAPTCHAs for it by pretending to be a blind person. Asterisk interviews Beth Barnes, leader of the team that ran those tests.
Inline links: Crash Testing GPT-4, made the news
What We Get Wrong About AI And China: Professor Jeffrey Ding discusses the Chinese AI situation. If I’m understanding right, China is 1-2 years behind the US, but that this number underplays the size of the gap, and if the US stopped innovating today, China wouldn’t necessarily push ahead in 3 years. Today’s Marginal Revolution links included a claim that a new Chinese model beats GPT-4; I’m very skeptical and waiting to hear more.
Inline links: What We Get Wrong About AI And China, Marginal Revolution links, a claim
AAAS1 mentions across 1 issues

AAAS is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 12, 2023 and April 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AAAS’ report balanced Jonas’ extreme approach with more moderate voices". It most often appears alongside AIDS, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Atul Gawande.

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AAAS
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1
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1
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April 12, 2023
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April 12, 2023
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Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill
April 12, 2023 · Original source
AAAS’ report balanced Jonas’ extreme approach with more moderate voices, producing something in between. There could be medical research, but only with meticulous consent processes intended to ensure subjects understood every risk, even the most outlandish. Rather than a straight weighing of risks vs. benefits, overseers should start with a presumption that risk was unacceptable, and weigh benefits only weakly. This framework might have evolved further, but in the uproar following Tuskegee, Congress set it in stone, never to be changed by mere mortals.
Aalto1 mentions across 1 issues

Aalto is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 18, 2021 and August 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Researchers at Oxford and Aalto study where people think it’s appropriate for other people to touch them". It most often appears alongside AI risk, Borgias, China.

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Aalto
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1
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1
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August 18, 2021
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August 18, 2021
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Links For August
August 18, 2021 · Original source
6: Researchers at Oxford and Aalto study where people think it’s appropriate for other people to touch them; at some point, this got transformed into terrible maps that serve as a parable against…overfitting, maybe?…I don’t even know…definitely a parable against something. “As a man, you are tentatively okay with your hands being touched by your mother, father, sister, or brother. You actually quite like your hands being touched by your uncle. You are implacably opposed to your hands being touched by your aunt.” And so on.
Inline links: transformed into terrible maps
AAPI Protection League1 mentions across 1 issues

AAPI Protection League is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2025 and July 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a lot of Coptic people in AAPI Protection League". It most often appears alongside Aaron, AI Alignment, Alito.

Reference entry
AAPI Protection League
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
July 21, 2025
Last seen
July 21, 2025
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Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
July 21, 2025 · Original source
“And you know how five years ago, someone painted ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS on the I-80 overpass? And it’s just been sitting there, a huge eyesore to everyone driving through? Someone noticed that there are a lot of Coptic people in AAPI Protection League, so we hired someone to add a T, ALL COPTS ARE BASTARDS, and the city got permission to paint over it.”
AARO1 mentions across 1 issues

AARO is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AARO (the government’s new UFO investigation group)". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, Adam Piovarchy.

Reference entry
AARO
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1
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1
First seen
July 06, 2023
Last seen
July 06, 2023
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Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
The CSS General Price 17: Several people have said nice things about the Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist events space where we hold Berkeley ACX meetups. Mingyuan, who helped decorate it, now has a Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide with what she’s learned about light color temperature, chairs, rugs, and more. 18: Elo Everything is simple: it gives you two random people/objects/concepts, for example “soap” and “Nelson Mandela”, and you pick which one you prefer. Then they have a leaderboard with everything’s Elo (a way of ranking things based on victory in binary contests). The current #1 entity is oxygen; the bottom (#2260) entity is the KKK. 19: Erik Hoel tries to deflate UFO rumors. Although most of the post is the standard “here’s a time someone thought they saw a UFO but it had a reasonable explanation”, the highlight is the dissection of the credulous 2017 NYT article on UFOs, which based on his story sounds totally inexcusable (yes, the government funded a lot of money into UFO research, but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt). Nothing here directly addresses the current spate of UFO rumors, but the silliness of the previous batch is indirect evidence of a sort. One thing he didn’t highlight: the Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts. 20: Related: the most practical demand I’ve heard from people who take the current UFO rumors seriously is that AARO (the government’s new UFO investigation group) should get Title 50 authority (the right to demand classified information from intelligence services). Read their campaign (maybe sort of supported by some members of Congress) here. Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”. 21: This month in social justice: New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists; “diverse” patients can jump ahead in the queue compared to other patients who may have waited longer or be sicker. The government says this just “corrects” institutional biases which exist at other stages; I don’t know the New Zealand situation but have found previous claims of this sort flimsy. Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage. I can’t find the algorithm they say they’re using anywhere; here is a FOIA-equivalent request for it which hasn’t been answered yet. This file seems related and suggests Maori should get the highest priority and Asians the lowest priority, but I’m not sure they’re exactly following the science here. I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones, it also caused scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups because of implementation details. We should be fighting for less of this, not more. 22: Related: affirmative action Supreme Court ruling links roundup: Will the ruling really change admissions policies, or will universities find a way around it? Humphrey on DSL works in the field and says he thinks it will produce real change.
Inline links: General Price, Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide, Elo Everything, leaderboard, tries to deflate UFO rumors, Bigelow Aerospace, maybe sort of supported by, here, is named, New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists, various, articles, here, This file, scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups, says he thinks it will produce real change
AARP1 mentions across 1 issues

AARP is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 31, 2025 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "And the AARP seemed very, very convinced that minor changes to how inflation was calculated"; "(1) https://states.aarp.org/what-is-the-chained-cpi". It most often appears alongside 1955, 4chan, Aella.

Reference entry
AARP
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
December 31, 2025
Last seen
December 31, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
Specifically, I can remember around 2013 when there was a proposal that Social Security COLA adjustments (annual cost of living increases) be tied to Chained CPI, rather than CPI. And the AARP seemed very, very convinced that minor changes to how inflation was calculated would dramatically impact real people’s Social Security checks (1). I’ve seen calculations that chained CPI is 0.25-0.3% (5) lower than CPI. Which is small overall but large relative to overall inflation, roughly 2%, and compounding.
(1) https://states.aarp.org/what-is-the-chained-cpi
Inline links: https://states.aarp.org/what-is-the-chained-cpi
AB1 mentions across 1 issues

AB is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 18, 2021 and November 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Niels Bohr was a goalkeeper on the same top club team (AB)"; "on the same top club team (AB)". It most often appears alongside 23andme, Abraham Mendelssohn, Albert Baez.

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AB
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
November 18, 2021
Last seen
November 18, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Niels Bohr was a goalkeeper on the same top club team (AB) as his brother but left after a season:
Abandon Harris1 mentions across 1 issues

Abandon Harris is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 30, 2024 and October 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Abandon Harris" is a group of Muslim-Americans who campaign against Kamala Harris". It most often appears alongside 1984, Acemoglu, Anthony Fauci.

Reference entry
Abandon Harris
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1
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1
First seen
October 30, 2024
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October 30, 2024
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ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
"Abandon Harris" is a group of Muslim-Americans who campaign against Kamala Harris to "punish her" (their words) for supporting Israel's war in Gaza. You can see their website at https://abandonharris.com
ABC testing1 mentions across 1 issues

ABC testing is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 27, 2025 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Certified Labs used to be ABC testing"; "selecting Certified Labs/ABC testing for a specific reason". It most often appears alongside /r/NootropicsDepot, @fae_dreams, @ObhishekSaha.

Reference entry
ABC testing
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1
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1
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February 27, 2025
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February 27, 2025
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Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
Some blueprint products seem to be clearly out of spec, so Mr. Johnson probably doesn't really know what he's doing either. Not to mention that the lab they seem to be using, Certified Labs, used to be ABC testing which we know have botched a bunch of testing in the past. So bad in fact, that the FDA even intervened. It's always funny that quite a few brands with problematic products all seem to do their testing via Certified Labs/ABC testing. For example, look at where Gorilla Mind is testing their products, like Turkplex, which recently failed miserably in our testing. Bryan Johnson boasts about having all the money in the world, and that he's so super advanced blah blah blah, but he's testing with a seemingly sketchy lab even though there are a plethora of very well known labs doing great work, like Alkemist Labs for example. It really makes me wonder if these guys are knowingly selecting Certified Labs/ABC testing for a specific reason, or perhaps Certified Labs is very aggressive in marketing and if you are new in the industry, they may be the first lab you find? Odd, but could be a possibility.
Inline links: clearly out of spec, used to be ABC testing, FDA even intervened, like Turkplex
ABHoN1 mentions across 1 issues

ABHoN is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "In these parts, ABHoN’s modus operandi is to give a vague summary of what happened"; "ABHoN doesn't give any reason for the failure of Bretton Woods". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

Reference entry
ABHoN
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
May 04, 2021
Last seen
May 04, 2021
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Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
Sound straightforward? Not if you read about it in David Harvey's A Brief History Of Neoliberalism. This treatment is almost the opposite of the way ABHoN describes events. Telling the story this way makes me feel like Jacques Derrida deconstructing some text to undermine the author and prove that they were arguing against themselves all along.
Inline links: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
In these parts, ABHoN’s modus operandi is to give a vague summary of what happened, then overload it with emotional language. Nobody in ABHoN ever cuts a budget, they savagely slash the budget, or cruelly decimate the budget, or otherwise [dramatic adverb] [dramatic verb] it. Nobody is ever against neoliberal reform - they bravely stand up to neoliberal reform, or valiantly resist neoliberal reform, or whatever. Nobody ever “makes” money, they “extract” it. So you read a superficial narrative of some historical event, with all the adverbs changed to more dramatic adverbs, and then a not-very-convincing discussion of why this was all about re-establishing plutocratic power at the end of it. This is basically an entire literary genre by now, and ABHoN fits squarely within it.
The first thesis is mostly implicit. ABHoN doesn't give any reason for the failure of Bretton Woods and the 1970s economic crisis. It mostly takes it as a given, interesting only insofar as plutocrats used it as an excuse for pushing neoliberal policies. It never explicitly denies that it happened, it just thinks that it happened in the same sense that the sinking of the Maine happened - less interesting in and of itself than the fact that sinister forces were able to leverage it for their sinister ends.
Inline links: sinking of the Maine
About Here1 mentions across 1 issues

About Here is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "video will be produced by urbanist youtube channel About Here". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

Reference entry
About Here
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
February 03, 2022
Last seen
February 03, 2022
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#42: Publish Books On Architecture I am an architect based in India trying to build a research-based design practice. I am seeking funding of 4000$ to finish self-publishing two e-books on the Amazon marketplace that will form part of my PhD application in December 2022. The costs will cover printing of test dummies, sending a few copies to prospective guides, mentors and pay for miscellaneous fees. A validated writing practice is a desired application requirement that I am trying to full fill with the exercise. The theme of the work is to show how patronage has changed knowledge production of architecture across the four generations that have practiced, are practicing in the country. An attempt to fund the project is to prove the hypothesis that the creative economy is the only way ahead for architectural practices if necessary policy guidelines are not implemented for a sustainable future for the profession. If funded process of getting an admission and transition the research done to further work on architectural imagination may also be easier. I have complied a reading list of almost an entirety of Indian architectural design books from 1985 - 2019, around 100/125, that enables the project. These will be uploaded on my Instagram account starting here. Contents and introduction to the first book is accessed here https://isaacmathew.substack.com/p/daily-sentences-2111072039. Isaac Mathew 2201240945 . Contact me at isaac@spatialresearch.net
Inline links: here
#5: YIMBY Explainer Video On Migration Chains I'm Michael Wiebe, and I will make a YIMBY explainer video on migration chains, to show how even expensive new apartments can improve housing affordability for everyone. The basic idea: A moves into a newly built apartment, B moves into A's old house, C moves into B's old house, which frees up affordable housing for D in a poorer neighborhood. The video will put a human face on the process, by interviewing everyone in a chain, and showing how real people in low-income neighborhoods benefit from new market-rate apartments. For example, we could show a poor college student who benefits from a vacancy in a studio apartment near their university, and trace that vacancy to the construction of a market-rate apartment building. The idea of migration chains is new, and is a big improvement over a simple supply and demand model, which NIMBYs don’t trust anyway. This model has an intuitive mechanism, where people moving *into* new housing are also moving *out* of old housing. Since the mechanism is general and applies everywhere, promoting this idea is high-leverage: it can be used to support YIMBY activism all around the world. I'm a PhD economist and can summarize the research (eg. see here). The video will be produced by urbanist youtube channel About Here, who budgets $5000 per video. We'll also need $1000 to buy food to incentivize volunteers to trace out a complete chain. Please contact me at maswiebe@gmail.com.
Inline links: here
AC&E1 mentions across 1 issues

AC&E is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2021 and September 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "AC&E act as if this is reassuring - their conclusion starts with 'most persistent symptoms reported following mild COVID-19'". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, AcesoUnderGlass, AcesoUnderGlass.

Reference entry
AC&E
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1
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1
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September 02, 2021
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September 02, 2021
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Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
September 02, 2021 · Original source
...in the exposures than the controls. Other studies don’t really show this pattern. And behold the mother of all COVID symptom persistence studies, Amin-Chowdhury et al : AC&E act as if this is reassuring - their conclusion starts with “most persistent symptoms reported following mild COVID-19 were equally common in cases and controls” - but i...
acr-tokyo1 mentions across 1 issues

acr-tokyo is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

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acr-tokyo
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1
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1
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March 30, 2024
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March 30, 2024
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
TOKYO Contact: JT Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 10:00 AM Location: Contact email for the address - location TBD in Meguro Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPP5+48 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Please join our google group! We email once a month to announce meetups.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPP5+48, https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/
ACS1 mentions across 1 issues

ACS is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 29, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I can't square is your ACS data which shows overall declining drug use". It most often appears alongside A History Of Mankind, Alexander Turok, Alice K.

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ACS
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1
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1
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June 29, 2022
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June 29, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
i.e., One reasonable prior is that increased homelessness is associated with increased drug use, and that increased drug use is associated with increased deaths due to use of drugs. That seems to be borne out in the official Dutch data. As homelessness has gotten worse, so too have drug-related deaths. What I can't square is your ACS data which shows overall declining drug use. I have to look into that some more.
ACSH1 mentions across 1 issues

ACSH is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 17, 2021 and November 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Like this ACSH article about Nexium". It most often appears alongside ACE-2 receptor, Ahmed et al, Alexandros Marinos.

Reference entry
ACSH
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
November 17, 2021
Last seen
November 17, 2021
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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 17, 2021 · Original source
Source. Real data would follow something like a bell curve. This is going to require a social norm of always sharing data. Even better, journals should require the raw data before they publish anything, and should make it available on their website. People are going to fight hard against this, partly because it’s annoying and partly because of (imho exaggerated) patient privacy related concerns. Somebody’s going to try make some kind of gated thing where you have to prove you have a PhD and a “legitimate cause” before you can access the data, and that person should be fought tooth and nail (some of the “data detectives” who figured out the ivermectin study didn’t have advanced degrees). I want a world where “I did a study, but I can’t show you the data” should be taken as seriously as “I determined P = NP, but I can’t show you the proof.” The second reason I think this, aside from checking for fraud, is checking for mistakes. I have no proof this was involved in ivermectin in particular. But I’ve been surprised how often it comes up when I talk to scientists. Someone in their field got a shocking result, everyone looked over the study really hard and couldn’t find any methodological problems, there’s no evidence of fraud, so do you accept it? A lot of times instead I hear people say “I assume they made a coding error”. I believe them, because I have made a bunch of stupid errors. Sometimes you make the errors for me - an early draft of this post of mine stated that there was an strong positive effect of assortative mating on autism, but when I double-checked it was entirely due to some idiot who filled out the survey and claimed to have 99999 autistic children. In this very essay, I almost said that a set of ivermectin studies showed a positive result because I was reading the number for whether two lists were correlated rather than whether a paired-samples t-test on the lists was significant. I think lots of studies make these kinds of errors. But even if it’s only 1%, these will make up much more than 1% of published studies, and much more than 1% of important ground-breaking published studies, because correct studies can only prove true things, but false studies can prove arbitrarily interesting hypotheses (did you know there was an increase in the suicide rate on days that Donald Trump tweeted?!?) and those are the ones that will get published and become famous. So if the lesson of the original replication crisis was “read the methodology” and “read the preregistration document”, this year’s lesson is “read the raw data”. Which is a bit more of an ask. Especially since most studies don’t make it available. The Sociological Takeaway I’ve been thinking about this one a lot too. Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas. But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate. Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much. @jonno_bosch I work in hospitality so I need things to return to normal ASAP. I am using Ivermectin as a prophylactic. Hugely influenced by Carvallo trail and Chala trail which showed huge protection","username":"Bannisterious","name":"Andrew Bannister","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Feb 12 16:21:14 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @mtskullcrusher @HereComeTheJud @therealjosexy @joeycadre @PeegeRiley @dcwickedestcity @blaireerskine Read Raad. Or Mahmud. Or ICON study from Florida. Or Mexico City hospitalizations study. Or Niaee. Or...\n\nOr just type \"ivermectin covid\" in Google Scholar and read.","username":"fatlas6","name":"fatlas","profile_image_url":"","date":"Thu Sep 02 21:34:59 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":1,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> They have a very reasonable-sounding belief, which is that if dozens of studies all say a drug works really well, then it probably works really well. When they see dozens of studies saying a drug works really well, and the elites saying “no don’t take it!”, their extremely natural conclusion is that it works really well but the elites are covering it up. Sometimes these people even have a specific theory for why elites are covering up ivermectin, like that pharma companies want you to use more expensive patented drugs instead. This theory is extremely plausible. Pharma companies are always trying to convince people to use expensive patented drugs instead of equally good generic alternatives. Ivermectin believers probably heard about this from the many, many good articles by responsible news outlets, discussing the many, many times pharma companies have tried to trick people into using more expensive patented medications. Like this ACSH article about Nexium. Or my article on esketamine. Given that dozens of studies said a drug worked, and elites continued to deny it worked, and there are well-known times where elites lie about drugs in order to make money, it was an incredibly reasonable inference that this was one of those times. If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it. I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic! If you tell these people to “believe Science”, you will just worsen the problem where they trust dozens of scientific studies done by scientists using the scientific method over the pronouncements of the CDC or whoever. So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught. But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”? Then what about “believe statisticians”? I’ve never heard anyone propose this before, but re-centering the mystique of scientific-expertise in study-analyzers and study-aggregators rather than object-level scientists is…one way you could go, I guess. Statisticians admittedly sort of failed us here: the first several meta-analyses said ivermectin worked. But the statistical process - the idea that studies are raw materials, but it takes skill to turn them into the finished good of scientific knowledge - sort of comes out looking good. If we need to summarize our takeaway in a slogan of exactly two words, one of which is “trust”, you could do worse than this one. (am I secretly suggesting that we make rationality higher status? Maybe, although rationalists did no better here during the early phase of “looks promising so far” than anyone else, and it was researchers digging into the nitty-gritty of the data who really solved this.) Or maybe this is the wrong level on which to think about this. Maybe there isn’t and can’t be a simple heuristic you can teach everyone in school or via a PR campaign which will lead to them having making good health decisions in an adversarial information environment, without having any negative effects anywhere else. But you also don’t want people to make bad health decisions. So what do you do? The Political Takeaway All of this is complicated by the impression many people (including me) have, that ivermectin boosterism and vaccine denialism are closely linked. The ivermectin evidence is complicated. There’s room for doubt. I can maybe see room for doubt on some marginal vaccine-related issues like how seriously to take the occasional reports of myocarditis in teens. But the basic issue - that the vaccine works really well and is incredibly safe for adults - seems beyond question. Yet people keep questioning it. I think it’s important to address ivermectin support on its own terms - as a potentially plausible scientific theory in a debris field of confusing evidence, which should be debated to the usual standards of scientific debate. I’ve tried to do that above. But this picture wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the overlap with vaccine denial - a segment of people who are completely crazy and wrong and who happen to have fixated on this mildly interesting question as opposed to some other one with even less evidence. I’ve been trying to figure out a model where ivermectin support and vaccine denialism both make visceral sense to me, and here’s what I’ve got: Imagine that in 2025, an alien invasion fleet reaches Earth. But it got hit by a supernova on the way, the spaceships are partly disabled, and they’re only able to conquer some out-of-the-way place - let’s say Australia. There’s a few cycles of conflict and cease-fire, a few cities get nuked, and finally we settle into an uneasy peace. Over the next few years, humanity grudgingly admits the invaders into the world community. They get a seat in the United Nations. We sort of cooperate with them on projects that are important to both sides, like stopping climate change. We still hate them, but only at the level of ordinary international rivalries, like USA/USSR. In 2035, the aliens announce that a quantum memetic plague from the Andromeda Sector has reached Earth. Billions of people will die unless we let them put an immunity-granting cybernetic implant in all humans’ brain. The aliens admit we haven’t always been friends, and honestly they would still like to conquer us someday. But this plague is an ancient enemy of all sentient beings, they dealt with it on their homeworld eons ago, and they want to help us out here. Humans apparently don’t have the ability to detect quantum memetic plagues, but mortality rates for over-65s do seem weirdly high this year, something like 10x worse than a normal flu season. Do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? If it helps, the aliens look like this. Surely anyone with a brain that size must know what they’re talking about, right? (source) Fine, you don’t have to decide immediately. The brain implants aren’t even ready yet. Some human scientists suggest wearing face masks in the interim. The aliens say no, that will never work, that’s not how you deal with quantum memetic plagues, if you do anything other than wait for the brain implants you’re anti-science idiots who are wasting precious time and will kill millions of people. Human nations try face masks anyway…and they clearly and conspicuously work. The aliens say whatever, we’re still the advanced spacefaring civilization here, maybe it works for humans but that’s not the point, the point is you’ve got to let us put implants in your brains. Some human scientists suggest reopening vital services. The aliens say no, millions will die, this is “mass human sacrifice”, humans apparently must care nothing about their families’ lives. The humans try reopening anyway, and…it goes kind of okay? Maybe the death rate goes up 10% to 20% or so, hard to say? The aliens say whatever, maybe their calculations were off by a few orders of magnitude, the point is, you have to let us put implants in your brain or you’ll all die. Then some human scientists suggest vaccinating against the plague. The aliens say this is idiotic, vaccines originally come from cowpox, even the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccus meaning “cow”, are you saying you want cow medicine instead of actual brain implants which alien Science has proven will work? They make lots of cartoons displaying humans who want vaccines as having cow heads, or rolling around in cow poop. Meanwhile, the first few dozen studies show vaccines work great. Many top human leaders, including war heroes from the struggle against the aliens, get vaccines and are seen going out in public, looking healthy and happy. The aliens say that human science is hopelessly flawed because of complicated statistical concepts that inferior life forms like us don’t even have words for. You need to ignore all the studies and meta-analyses showing that vaccines definitely work, and let the aliens give you brain implants instead. So do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? Obviously you think long and hard before doing this. And obviously this is an extended metaphor for vaccine denialism. So what’s the difference between the metaphor (where you’re presumably anti-implant) and the real world (where you’re presumably pro-vaccine?) For me, it’s a combination of: The aliens are hostile, so I don’t trust them no matter how smart they are
Inline links: Source, this post, this ACSH article about Nexium, my article on esketamine, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1UIV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F598d7d6c-de95-4b94-b13a-3c8a452b0409.jp2, source
ACSresearch.org1 mentions across 1 issues

ACSresearch.org is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2024 and March 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Jan Kulveit, who leads ACSresearch.org, a research group working on how to have complex systems composed of AIs and humans exist in harmony". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, Adam.

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ACSresearch.org
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1
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1
First seen
March 18, 2024
Last seen
March 18, 2024
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Open Thread 320
March 18, 2024 · Original source
Jan Kulveit, who leads ACSresearch.org, a research group working on how to have complex systems composed of AIs and humans exist in harmony. He sometimes teaches at events about rationality and epistemics organized by Fabric.
Inline links: ACSresearch.org, Fabric
ACT1 mentions across 1 issues

ACT is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2024 and December 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "wife (135+ish, based off ACT score". It most often appears alongside AI, America, Asterisk.

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ACT
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
December 10, 2024
Last seen
December 10, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
Putting this in as nice and polite a way as I can: I suspect I am on the low-end for IQ (perfectly high midwit-ish 117) of the average ACX reader, but interestingly wife (135+ish, based off ACT score, STEM PhD from Ivy League uni) is closer to modal for this site. So I get to have the fun experience of interacting with someone a full StDev smarter than me, and one thing I often experience is that smart people tend to underestimate how much harder it is for someone with that difference in raw intellectual capacity to do things they can ("No, love of my life, I am not interested in making a Python model to figure out which healthcare option is the best for us."). This was especially heightened when we were foster parents for awhile, and one of our placement was...whatever the appropriate term is nowadays for someone with a 63 IQ (which we were probably the first people in his family to find out about, since I was told I was the first person to ever show up for one of his school's IEP meetings); living with top and bottom 1% intellectual functioning was a very illustrative experience!
Act Blue1 mentions across 1 issues

Act Blue is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2023 and February 02, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I donated a little bit of money through Act Blue". It most often appears alongside ACXers, Alex Berenson, Astralcodexten.

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Act Blue
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1
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1
First seen
February 02, 2023
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February 02, 2023
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Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
Maybe only disinformation-spreaders would be evil enough to use the bad kind of propaganda-bot, the one that pretends to be your friend? I admit this is possible. But assuming the backlash works out so that anyone will use it, I don’t trust the establishment to be especially responsible. One time - one time! - I donated a little bit of money through Act Blue, and ever since then I’ve been getting constant annoying spam texts from Nancy Pelosi that no number-block seems to stop. This makes me skeptical of claims about the establishment’s unwillingness to use scummy annoying propaganda techniques.
ACT UP San Francisco1 mentions across 1 issues

ACT UP San Francisco is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 05, 2021 and August 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the AIDS activist organization ACT UP San Francisco called Anthony Fauci a “pill-pushing pimp”". It most often appears alongside aducanumab, aducanumab, Aduhelm.

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ACT UP San Francisco
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
August 05, 2021
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August 05, 2021
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Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
A new program in 1992 allowed for “accelerated approval” on the basis of surrogate markers, which are indirect measures of a drug’s benefit, assessed via laboratory or imaging tests, that stand in for more meaningful outcomes such as life expectancy. But the implementation of these accelerated processes was criticized by some scientists and patients, even at the time. In 1994, for example, The New York Times cited skeptics who worried that “no one can tell if the drugs work.” Eight months later, the AIDS activist organization ACT UP San Francisco called Anthony Fauci a “pill-pushing pimp” for supporting CD4 immune-cell counts and viral loads as surrogate markers. They were completely invalid, the activists wrote, and nothing more than “a marketing exec’s wet dream.”
SSC1 mentions across 1 issues

ACT/SSC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""This story is directionally and emotionally accurate, so don't worry that my supporting arguments were wrong" is exactly the kind of BS I want to see ACT/SSC as fighting against"; ""...the kind of BS I want to see ACT/SSC as fighting against in the rest of media."". It most often appears alongside aducanumab, aducanumab, Aduhelm.

Reference entry
SSC
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1
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1
First seen
August 20, 2021
Last seen
August 20, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
Scott's charging for content now, and is doing important, high profile investigatory journalism. It's not OK to get so many relevant facts wrong. "This story is directionally and emotionally accurate, so don't worry that my supporting arguments were wrong" is exactly the kind of BS I want to see ACT/SSC as fighting against in the rest of media.
ACTIV-61 mentions across 1 issues

ACTIV-6 is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 09, 2022 and October 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the big COVID drug trials (TOGETHER, ACTIV-6, COVID-OUT)". It most often appears alongside Alexandros Marinos, Astralcodexten Com, bulletin board.

Reference entry
ACTIV-6
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1
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1
First seen
October 09, 2022
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October 09, 2022
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Open Thread 245
October 09, 2022 · Original source
3: Alexandros Marinos continues his critique of my ivermectin post, and his broader ivermectin advocacy. I can’t remember if I’ve said this before, but I commit to writing a summary and response within four months of him being done, which as far as I can tell is not yet (yes, four months is a long time, but it’s a long series and I’m really busy this winter). His most recent post argues that the big COVID drug trials (TOGETHER, ACTIV-6, COVID-OUT) haven’t made their data public, and offers to donate $25,000 to a charity of my choice if I can get them to do so. I have no idea how to do this, but I agree that they should; if anyone from these trials wants to get in touch with me and talk about it and I would be interested in hearing what’s going on.
Inline links: continues, my ivermectin post
ACX Atlanta1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Atlanta is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 01, 2026 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry
ACX Atlanta
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
April 01, 2026
Last seen
April 01, 2026
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[@]digitaltoolfactory[.]net Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1, Atlanta, GA 30318 - look for the yellow ACX sign - we should be in the front breezeway Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8 Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8
ACX Bot1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Bot is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 14, 2022 and February 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022". It most often appears alongside Alexander Cube, Augur, Clay Graubard.

Reference entry
ACX Bot
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 14, 2022
Last seen
February 14, 2022
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Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold
February 14, 2022 · Original source
Not actually in order This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one. The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation. Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question: Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go. ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it! Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position. Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little. Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute. Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit. Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology. Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible. This Week In Metaculus A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg: The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely. Improving adult IQ is really hard. This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down. Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be. Shorts Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.
Inline links: predictions from 2022, ACX posts on Georgism, Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V2bV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca419ec2-7b91-44cd-80b0-2aad1baa4c2f_766x166.png, The question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ah6n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ff4f28d-1901-45f2-85bc-8f1c2120ecd1_770x187.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zSK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80e3383c-6f68-412a-ac90-ca63236bdb10_769x167.png, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!frCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F976d1b66-daee-43d1-948a-500e77ac5a2f_764x164.png, this market, holding an essay contest
ACX Chicago1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Chicago is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2024 and October 22, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Chicago tries to navigate the situation and endorse candidates for the ten open school board seats"; "Thanks to ACX Chicago for keeping us abreast of such important political news!". It most often appears alongside ACX Oakland, Austin, Bears.

Reference entry
ACX Chicago
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 22, 2024
Last seen
October 22, 2024
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ACX Local Voting Guides
October 22, 2024 · Original source
CHICAGO: Guide here. Chicago local government has some drama this year; the entire school board resigned as part of an ongoing fight; the mayor and his teachers union allies want to fire the more technocratic and reform-minded school administrator Pedro Martinez, but Martinez isn't going. ACX Chicago tries to navigate the situation and endorse candidates for the ten open school board seats. Other questions facing the city include mandating that insurances provide unlimited IVF (the group is weakly against) and using taxpayer money to buy the Bears a new stadium (don't do it!). The most interesting candidate name on the ballot is "Shannon O'Malley" - not because this is an unusual name in itself, but because Mr. O'Malley is a Polish guy who changed his name to something female- and Irish-sounding after learning that Irish women are a sympathetic demographic who do well in elections. Thanks to ACX Chicago for keeping us abreast of such important political news!
Inline links: Guide here, changed his name
ACX comments section1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX comments section is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX comments section, she can be found mentoring young engineers". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry
ACX comments section
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 17, 2025
Last seen
October 17, 2025
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Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
Dating Men In The Bay Area, by Alex King. Alex is an engineer from San Francisco. She’ll be experimenting with more essays on her new blog, King of Daydreams. When she’s not igniting turmoil in the ACX comments section, she can be found mentoring young engineers, hosting community events, and failing to find a boyfriend. She pinky-promises she is not Aella.
Inline links: Dating Men In The Bay Area, King of Daydreams
ACX Edinburgh1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Edinburgh is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Edinburgh is active; email acxedinburgh@gmail.com to be added to their mailing list or WhatsApp group". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
ACX Edinburgh
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
April 10, 2022
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Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam (acxedinburgh@gmail.com) Date: April 23 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV6+XF Location (updated!): The Balcony Room in Teviot Row House (3rd floor) Group info: ACX Edinburgh is active; email acxedinburgh@gmail.com to be added to their mailing list or WhatsApp group
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV6+XF
ACX Everywhere1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Everywhere is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "If Cassander claims to be running ACX Everywhere, this is false". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
ACX Everywhere
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Meetup Czar Note: If Cassander claims to be running ACX Everywhere, this is false. We have fully split with Cassander, and ask that he no longer use the Astral Codex Ten or Slate Star Codex brand.
ACX fan bulletin board Data Secrets Lox1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX fan bulletin board Data Secrets Lox is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 31, 2022 and January 31, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Classifieds Forum on the unofficial ACX fan bulletin board Data Secrets Lox". It most often appears alongside AMac78, Austin, Classifieds Forum.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 31, 2022
Last seen
January 31, 2022
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Open Thread 209
January 31, 2022 · Original source
If you missed the Classifieds thread, you can always use the Classifieds Forum on the unofficial ACX fan bulletin board Data Secrets Lox.
Inline links: Classifieds Forum
ACX grant winners1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX grant winners is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2024 and June 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX grant winners at the Far Out Initiative". It most often appears alongside 2023 special, African Gray Parrot, Alex.

Reference entry
ACX grant winners
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 28, 2024
Last seen
June 28, 2024
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Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
But he ignores the fact that a less stressed line of pigs will, in theory, be more comfortable. The ACX grant winners at the Far Out Initiative are pushing things even further than those scientists with the stress gene. They are on a quest to alter farm animal genetics so that they don’t feel pain at all. Would it be a bad thing if they succeed? There could be unintended consequences of course, but on the other hand, the most eloquent plea for mercy isn’t going to make the day-to-day pain of being a farm animal hurt any less. There are billions of farmed creatures out there who could use a little more than thoughts, prayers, and philosophical musings about what does and does not qualify as “respect for nature.”
Inline links: Far Out Initiative
ACX Grantee 1DaySooner1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Grantee 1DaySooner is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2026 and March 30, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Grantee 1DaySooner is looking for a Policy Lead for their Clinical Trial Abundance work". It most often appears alongside AI pause, Astralcodexten Com, Clinical Trial Abundance.

Reference entry
ACX Grantee 1DaySooner
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
March 30, 2026
Last seen
March 30, 2026
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Open Thread 427
March 30, 2026 · Original source
1: ACX Grantee 1DaySooner is looking for a Policy Lead for their Clinical Trial Abundance work. Work will be remote but DC location a plus, $100K - $145K salary, see here for more information and the application form.
Inline links: see here
ACX Grantee Discord server1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Grantee Discord server is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 08, 2023 and December 08, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "You’ll be invited to an ACX Grantee Discord server". It most often appears alongside 501(c), ACX, ACX Grants.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 08, 2023
Last seen
December 08, 2023
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Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
You’ll be invited to an ACX Grantee Discord server, where you can talk to other grantees. I don’t really understand why people want this so much, but some of last year’s grantees seemed to appreciate it. One of them is considering sponsoring a physical ACX Grantee meetup in the Bay Area, which you would be welcome to attend if it happened. I wouldn’t be able to give you extra money to travel to this, sorry.
ACX Grantee Manifold Markets1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Grantee Manifold Markets is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2022 and November 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Grantee Manifold Markets is looking for new investors after some recent growth". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 28, 2022
Last seen
November 28, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 252
November 28, 2022 · Original source
1: ACX Grantee Manifold Markets is looking for new investors after some recent growth. If interested, email austin@manifold.markets for more details. Product sample below:
Inline links: Manifold Markets
ACX Grantee ValueBase1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Grantee ValueBase is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 02, 2024 and December 02, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Grantee ValueBase , the Georgist land valuation company, is hiring software engineers". It most often appears alongside ACX.

Reference entry
ACX Grantee ValueBase
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 02, 2024
Last seen
December 02, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
  • ACX 1 shared issues
Source context
Open Thread 358
December 02, 2024 · Original source
...al subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: ACX Grantee ValueBase , the Georgist land valuation company, is hiring software engineers to work on their valuation pipeline. Link to the application here .
ACX Grantees Discord1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Grantees Discord is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2022 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Several people reminded me that I had said I was going to create some group for grantees to talk to each other"; "created the ACX Grantees Discord". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, acanthamoeba keratitis, ACX.

Reference entry
ACX Grantees Discord
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 04, 2022
Last seen
November 04, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
Several people told me that the exposure they got from my blog was as important as the money, which surprised me - I didn’t do a very good job giving people exposure and I wasn’t optimizing for that. Still, several places got employees or expert consultants out of it. Thanks to all of you who must have been going over my original grants announcement with a fine-toothed comb looking for projects to proactively reach out to and support. ACX Grantees Discord Several people reminded me that I had said I was going to create some group for grantees to talk to each other if for some reason they wanted to do that. Eleven months later, I’ve finally completed this ten-minute task and created the ACX Grantees Discord. If you’re a grantee, you should have already received an invitation; if not, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Several people reminded me that I had said I was going to create some group for grantees to talk to each other if for some reason they wanted to do that. Eleven months later, I’ve finally completed this ten-minute task and created the ACX Grantees Discord. If you’re a grantee, you should have already received an invitation; if not, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
ACX Grants team1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Grants team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 24, 2023 and February 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "won’t be done by September 1 / is a bad match for the ACX Grants team". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, ACX Mini-Grants, Advanced Settings.

Reference entry
ACX Grants team
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 24, 2023
Last seen
February 24, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Announcing Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants
February 24, 2023 · Original source
Q: I have a project that isn’t about forecasting / requires more than $20,000 / won’t be done by September 1 / is a bad match for the ACX Grants team - may I add it to the impact market?
ACX legal and economic analysis team1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX legal and economic analysis team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 06, 2026 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings". It most often appears alongside 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, American Nursing Association, Bay Area Cities.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 06, 2026
Last seen
March 06, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
SEIU Delenda Est
March 06, 2026 · Original source
Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree. Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were “developing an exit plan” and quotes an insider saying that “if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state”. Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it “makes no sense” and “would be really damaging”. The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley. On one level, it’s no surprise that California, a state full of bad socialists, is considering bad socialist policy. But I think this is the wrong perspective. This proposition isn’t being sponsored by some generic group of Piketty-reading leftists. It’s the project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a union of mostly healthcare workers. This immediately clarifies the debate about whether it’s net negative for revenue. 90% of the revenue from the tax is earmarked for health care. So even if it’s net negative for the state, it isn’t net negative for the health care budget in particular, ie for the people who are sponsoring the measure. But we can get even more conspiratorial. The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative. Their usual strategy goes: Propose a ballot initiative that will sound nice to voters, but which is actually deliberately designed to ruin some industry.
Inline links: propose, disagree, finds, has argued, doubt
ACX Leipzig Telegram group1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Leipzig Telegram group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Email me to get an invite link to the ACX Leipzig Telegram group". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Ben Contact Info: acxleipzig[a t]proton[period]me Time: Wednesday, October 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: We will be meeting in the famous Fechner house (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:WohnhausFechner.JPG), now home of Daniel, who's hosted ACX meetups there several times. The address is Scherlstraße 2. Ring the door at "Böttger Liebich". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3J89QR+PX Group Link: Email me to get an invite link to the ACX Leipzig Telegram group, if you want :) Notes: Feel free to send an email with any questions you have!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F3J89QR+PX
ACX London1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX London is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 25, 2025 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/acxlondon". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry
ACX London
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 25, 2025
Last seen
March 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
...ed[a t]newspeak[period]house Time: Saturday, May 31st, 1:00 PM Location: A small circular park just south of Gabriel's Pier. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XGV5R+458 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/acxlondon Notes: Not at the usual place! Picnic accoutrements would be warmly welcomed. Please register at https://lu.ma/ACX-London-May-2025 . NOTTINGHAM Contact: Alex Patterson C...
ACX Lyon1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Lyon is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Il y a un télégram ACX Lyon, si vous voulez être ajoutés envoyez moi un mail". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
ACX Lyon
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Lucas Contact Info: lucas_acx_meetup_lyon[a t]fastmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 6th, 4:00 PM Location: Parc de la tête d'or, à côté de la prairie aux daims. Nous aurons deux serviettes grises/brunes au sol et "ACX" écrit sur un carnet ou une feuille. Parc de la tête d'or, next to the "prairie aux daims". We will have two brown/grey towels on the ground and "ACX" written on a notebook or a piece of paper Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ6QVF2+GW Group Link: Il y a un télégram ACX Lyon, si vous voulez être ajoutés envoyez moi un mail. There is a telegram group for ACX Lyon, if you want to be added shoot me an email.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQ6QVF2+GW
ACX Oakland1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Oakland is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2024 and October 22, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Kudos to ACX Oakland for including district maps"; "Kudos to ACX Oakland for including district maps and recommendations for various transit and utility positions". It most often appears alongside ACX Chicago, Austin, Bears.

Reference entry
ACX Oakland
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 22, 2024
Last seen
October 22, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Local Voting Guides
October 22, 2024 · Original source
The strongest disagreement was over Prop 36, which increases penalties for various crimes. I’m hoping to publish a guest post on this one later this week. Kudos to ACX Oakland for including district maps and recommendations for various transit and utility positions.
ACX podcast team1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX podcast team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 28, 2022 and August 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX podcast team is involved in a new project". It most often appears alongside 1587: A Year Of No Significance, Astral Codex Ten, Canberra.

Reference entry
ACX podcast team
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 28, 2022
Last seen
August 28, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 239
August 28, 2022 · Original source
2: The ACX podcast team is involved in a new project, Radio Bostrom, broadcasting works by futurist philosopher Nick Bostrom.
Inline links: Radio Bostrom
ACX Tokyo1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Tokyo is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX Tokyo has been active monthly since the summer of 2021". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
ACX Tokyo
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
April 10, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold (hgodsoe@gmail.com) Date: May 14 Time: 10:00 AM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+RF Location: Justanotherspace 1 Chome-3-9 Kamimeguro, Meguro City, Tokyo 153-005 Group info: ACX Tokyo has been active monthly since the summer of 2021.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+RF
ACX Tokyo meetup group1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Tokyo meetup group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 20, 2022 and November 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX Tokyo meetup group will be hosting Bryan Caplan on December 4". It most often appears alongside ACX unofficial subreddit, AI Safety, AI-based analytics methods.

Reference entry
ACX Tokyo meetup group
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 20, 2022
Last seen
November 20, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 251
November 20, 2022 · Original source
4: The ACX Tokyo meetup group will be hosting Bryan Caplan on December 4, including a discussion of our long-running debate on mental illness (eg here, here). I won’t be able to make it but I trust our Japanese contingent to keep him honest. See here for details.
Inline links: here, here, See here for details
acx-tokyo1 mentions across 1 issues

acx-tokyo is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry
acx-tokyo
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2024
Last seen
August 29, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Harold Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 12th, 10:00 AM Location: Get in touch for the details! Coordinates: Get in touch for the details! Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Get in touch for the details!
Inline links: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/
EAs of Willamette Valley Discord1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Discord is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Discord". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Kenan Contact Info: kbitikofer[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, October 3rd, 6:00 PM Location: Tacovore @ 2503 NW Kings Blvd, Corvallis, OR 97330. If possible we'll sit at the outdoor tables. An "ACX Corvallis" paper will be visible on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PRHPRG+WH6 Group Link: ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Discord: https://discord.gg/AmQ [remove this bit] rjrrHQu
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84PRHPRG+WH6
Contact: Michael B Contact Info: michael[period]bacarella[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, September 10th, 6:00 PM Location: Beergarden. 777 W 6th Ave, Eugene, OR 97402 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G Group Link: https://discord.gg/Ba2 [remove this bit] TYVgxzw Notes: Hosted by the ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup (see our Discord!)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G
LW Budapest1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX/LW Budapest is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX/LW Budapest meets once a month". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
LW Budapest
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
April 10, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Timothy Underwood (timunderwood9@gmail.com) Date: May 7 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXG2CW+FF Location: In the middle of Gulliver Park on Margit Sziget, I'll have an umbrella and a big copy of a book by Richard Dawkins in Hungarian Group info: ACX/LW Budapest meets once a month
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVXG2CW+FF, ACX/LW Budapest
LW meetups1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX/LW meetups is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 27, 2022 and March 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the rationalist/EA establishment is trying to promote local meetups. local ACX/LW meetups organizer". It most often appears alongside ACX Book Review Contest, Andrew SB, April 11th.

Reference entry
LW meetups
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 27, 2022
Last seen
March 27, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 217
March 27, 2022 · Original source
Metaculus currently has him at 40% to win the primary and 29% to win the general. I’m closer to 60/45. Although he’s getting support from some big funders, campaign finance privileges small-to-medium-sized donations from ordinary people. If you want to support him, you can see a list of possible options here - including donations. You can donate max $2900 for the primary, plus another $2900 for the general that will be refunded if he doesn’t make it. If you do donate, it would be extra helpful if the money came in before a key reporting deadline March 31. 3: Every year in autumn I hold a big Meetups Everywhere event, and every time people tell me I should do it more often than once a year. So this time we’ll hold a mini-Meetups-Everywhere this April. It won’t be any different from your usual meetup schedule except that it’ll be the Schelling time for everyone who only wants to come once every few months to come. If you’re a meetups organizer (or want to become one), please fill in this form with the date of a meetup April 11th or later. Next Sunday I’ll put the results on the Open Thread for people to see. 4: Speaking of meetups, the rationalist/EA establishment is trying to promote local meetups. If you’re a local ACX/LW meetups organizer, you’re potentially invited to attend an all-expenses paid retreat in California in July with our meetups czar Mingyuan. Please read more here, then fill in this form to get on her radar. 5: And speaking of Mingyuan, she is going to inspect - sorry, enjoy the hospitality of - the East Coast meetup groups. She’ll be in DC: 4/11–4/13 Baltimore: 4/14 Philadelphia: 4/15–4/16 NYC: 4/17–4/21 Yale: 4/22–4/23 Northampton: 4/24–4/25 Boston: 4/26–5/1. The local groups have already taken care of having meetups at the right time, but she’s looking for people who could host her and drive her between cities . Email meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com if you can help. 6: Last week I tried to figure out the needs of community members in Russia and Ukraine. There are some great resources on the thread, but issues that still need solving: Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work
Inline links: here, donations., fill in this form, here, this form, on the thread, Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work
EA community1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX/rat/EA community is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 09, 2023 and October 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "starting this tiny unambitious impact market in the ACX/rat/EA community". It most often appears alongside Academic Decathlon, ACX Grants, Astralcodexten.

Reference entry
EA community
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 09, 2023
Last seen
October 09, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
Still, four of the five judges, including me, recommended relatively low amounts of retroactive funding. Partly this is because the project isn’t finished. But partly it’s because we’re confused and dubious. We had a hard enough time starting this tiny unambitious impact market in the ACX/rat/EA community, where everyone is rich, plugged-in, and loves weird institutional design. Devansh wants to build a much more ambitious impact market, in India, for investigative journalism in particular. And he’s trying to run it on arcane blockchain technology which must take special programmer expertise and whose justification I find a little flimsy. I acknowledge the vast ambition of this project, its impressive backers, and the large amount of work that’s already been done. I just don’t feel like funding a bet at these odds, and three of the remaining four judges agreed with me.
acx[at]cmart[dot]today1 mentions across 1 issues

acx[at]cmart[dot]today is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Contact Info: acx[at]cmart[dot]today". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
acx[at]cmart[dot]today
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
August 25, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
TUCSON, ARIZONA, USA Contact: Chris Contact Info: acx[at]cmart[dot]today Time: Saturday, October 7th, 11:15 AM Location: Boxyard at 238 N 4th Ave. Look for ACX tabletop sign. I'll try to get the big shaded table way in the back (next to Los Perches). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/854F62FM+VWW Notes: Boxyard is outdoor seating. It's likely that we'll have shade, but not a guarantee, so dress for possible sun. UPDATE: The original organizer won't be making it, so there may not actually be anyone there.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/854F62FM+VWW
ACXD discord1 mentions across 1 issues

ACXD discord is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can ask in the ACXD discord". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
ACXD discord
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Steven Contact Info: stevenl451[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 3:00 PM Location: Stulsaft Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VFQ42+55 Group Link: You can ask in the ACXD discord
Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VFQ42+55
ACXers1 mentions across 1 issues

ACXers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2023 and February 02, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend". It most often appears alongside Act Blue, Alex Berenson, Astralcodexten.

Reference entry
ACXers
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 02, 2023
Last seen
February 02, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend for more than a month who turned out to (unknown to them) be a chatbot, or who they strongly suspect may have been a chatbot, fewer than 10% will say yes. I may resolve this by common sense if it’s obvious, or by ACX survey if it’s not: 95%
If I ask ACXers in 2030 to estimate what percent of people they follow on Twitter are secretly chatbots, the median answer will be 5% or less: 85%
ACXG1 mentions across 1 issues

ACXG is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2025 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Last year, an ACXG-sponsored study worked to establish that they are safe for human use". It most often appears alongside 2023, Aaron Silverbook, ACX Grants.

Reference entry
ACXG
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 13, 2025
Last seen
October 13, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Misha Gurevich, Vivian Belenky, and Rachel A, $50K, to manufacture far-UVC lamps. Far-UVC is a type of ultraviolet light that kills germs rapidly; in a room with correctly-installed far-UVC lighting, viruses and bacteria die before they can reach another host, and the spread of contagious diseases plummets. In a world where this technology reached its full potential, respiratory pandemics like flu and coronavirus would cease to occur. Until now, these lamps have been limited to a few research prototypes. Last year, an ACXG-sponsored study worked to establish that they are safe for human use; results were reassuring. The next step is to produce them at scale as a consumer product for use in schools, daycares, and houses. Misha’s company Aerolamp has an early developer’s kit lamp on sale now, and is looking to hire an industrial designer experienced in safety and compliance who can help them transition to a mass-manufacturable version. If that’s you, get in touch with them here. Misha is a personal friend and a longtime ACXG evaluator; due to conflict of interest, this grant is being covered in conjunction with an outside funder.
Inline links: an early developer’s kit lamp on sale now, here
ACXG+ Grant1 mentions across 1 issues

ACXG+ Grant is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2022 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "This one was an ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, acanthamoeba keratitis, ACX.

Reference entry
ACXG+ Grant
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 04, 2022
Last seen
November 04, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research (8/10) This one was an ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Luca reports that “I'm 90% sure that filling in that form for ACX is the most pivotal thing I'll ever do” and that he was able to get started in AI safety research and now has an internship at an AI charity incubator. He is currently working remotely and would be like to know if anyone has advice about getting a US visa from Argentina; if you know how to help, contact me and I’ll refer you to him.
40: Typist For Saharon Shelah (7/10) This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made fourteen new preprints available (of which one has already been published in a journal) and they have thirty more in the pipeline.
Inline links: Saharon, this page
ACXPhiladelphia1 mentions across 1 issues

ACXPhiladelphia is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 25, 2025 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry
ACXPhiladelphia
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 25, 2025
Last seen
March 25, 2025
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Issue trail
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Wes Fenza Contact Info: wfenza[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 24th, 06:30 PM Location: Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. Upstairs in the Weston Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ Group Link: https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB; https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia Notes: Kids welcome. We'll provide an assortment of dim sum.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ, https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia
Advarra1 mentions across 1 issues

Advarra is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 17, 2023 and April 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "They can pick and choose which IRB best suits their needs. These include IRBs like Advarra and WIRB". It most often appears alongside Amazon, Anya L, arXiv.

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Advarra
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1
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1
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April 17, 2023
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April 17, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On IRBs
April 17, 2023 · Original source
This is kind of already how it goes. Smaller clinical sites tend to use what we call "central IRBs", which are essentially IRBs for hire. They can pick and choose which IRB best suits their needs. These include IRBs like Advarra and WIRB. Meanwhile, most clinicians at larger academic institutions have to use what we call a "local IRB", which is the institution-specific board that everything has to go through no matter what. In some cases, they can outsource the use of a 'central' IRB, but they still have to justify that decision to their institutional IRB, which still includes a lengthy review process (and the potential the IRB says "no").
What's the difference between a central and a local IRB? At least 2x the startup time, but often longer (from 3 months to 6+ months). Partly, this is because a smaller research site can decide to switch from WIRB to Advarra if their review times are too long, so central IRBs have an incentive to not be needlessly obstructive. While a central IRB might meet weekly or sometimes even more than once a week, with local IRBs you're lucky if they meet more than once a month. Did you miss your submission deadline? Better luck next month. You were supposed to get it in 2 weeks before the board meeting.
Adventure Nerds1 mentions across 1 issues

Adventure Nerds is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Adventure Nerds improves access to nature and outdoor activities. We are a startup that publishes books and resources". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

Reference entry
Adventure Nerds
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1
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1
First seen
February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#36: Improve Access To Outdoor Activities Adventure Nerds improves access to nature and outdoor activities. We are a startup that publishes books and resources that educate and inspire all people to get outside and enjoy nature. Adventure Nerds is a platform for sharing information that increases diversity in outdoor participation by proactively connecting communities to practical local information that is not readily available online. We reduce the cost and time required to plan outdoor activities so that people can confidently spend more time outdoors. Our educational resources give everyone the tools to plan safe, responsible adventures in nature and develop a lifelong passion for healthy outdoor activities. Integral to our work is partnering with nonprofit organizations and businesses to raise awareness for conservation and environmental action campaigns. Adventure Nerds launches in the spring of 2022 with support from Waypoint, a development program for outdoor organizations in Western North Carolina. We have published an example guidebook, and we are searching for start-up capital and business sponsors to create more resources. If you are interested in learning more or helping in any way, contact us through our website, https://adventurenerds.com/about-us.
Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA1 mentions across 1 issues

Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Mention count
1
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1
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June 18, 2025
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June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
AEC1 mentions across 1 issues

AEC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2023 and July 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AEC Commissioner James Ramey". It most often appears alongside 1960 Valdivia earthquake, Atomic Energy Commission, Bayesian priors.

Reference entry
AEC
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2023
Last seen
July 01, 2023
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Issue trail
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Source context
Your Book Review: Safe Enough?
July 01, 2023 · Original source
So the Atomic Energy Commission did what industry and government always do in times of crisis: It formed a commission. It proposed to unveil to the public a better risk assessment tool, not so much for use by industry (since nuclear power was, to them, obviously safe), but as a particularly intense form of content marketing:
In private, the fix was in, just as a cynic would expect. AEC Commissioner James Ramey was leery of an academic exercise he could not easily control, stating in 1973 "If it just shows one human life [lost], I'm against [publishing] it." But despite the public relations risk of a negative result, the project went forward.
AEI1 mentions across 1 issues

AEI is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "this is just napkin math, but it's congruent with the 70.9% figure AEI gives for average land share"; "land value estimation studies and databases like AEI's"; "AEI's figures are based directly on those results". It most often appears alongside 2017 PTAPP survey, agglomeration effect, Albouy.

Reference entry
AEI
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 09, 2021
Last seen
December 09, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
Here's a map of land prices across America's 100 largest metro areas, courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute. Notice that the most valuable properties are situated in coastal urban areas.
Source: American Enterprise Institute (methodology) Here's the same map but for land share–the percentage of a property's value that's due solely to the land. If you build a shack in the desert, nearly 100% of the property's value will come from the shack, because the land is worthless. But if you build a shack in San Francisco, nearly all of the property's value will come from the land. Notice how the land share gets closer to 100% as you move towards big cities along the coast.
Inline links: American Enterprise Institute, methodology
Even so, maybe you don't trust the American Enterprise Institute's figures and want to hear from some other people.
aella.ai1 mentions across 1 issues

aella.ai is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2023 and September 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend”". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, @eigenrobot, @jeremychrysler.

Reference entry
aella.ai
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 28, 2023
Last seen
September 28, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
29: Re…lated? Blogger/model Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend” based on her, as the flagship product of a company (?) that will help influencers create AI chatbot girlfriends based on themselves. I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Inline links: aella.ai
Aerialoop1 mentions across 1 issues

Aerialoop is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2022 and August 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "drone delivery service Aerialoop". It most often appears alongside Al-Nasr, Bloomberg, Bloomberg View.

Reference entry
Aerialoop
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2022
Last seen
August 01, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 22 August 01, 2022
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Source context
22
August 01, 2022 · Original source
The layout is supposedly based on brain coral, but is this really the best way to lay design a seastead? Does this pattern really maximize the ease of getting from Point A to Point B? If you like tropical paradises and are incredibly optimistic, you can buy a house in the Floating City here, prices seem to be $150-250K. This is not the long-awaited dream of the libertarian seastead; the whole city will be firmly anchored in Maldives, both physically and legally. But if it works, it’s a proof of concept that libertarians may be able to build on later. Elsewhere In Model Cities 1: Prospera now hosts the drone delivery service Aerialoop, which will eventually transport cargo from their Roatan Island hub to various outposts on the mainland; you can find more information here. Their long-term plans include eventually following this up with passenger drones. And here’s some more information on the growing drone industry in Latin America. 2: Related: Prospera intern and resident George Kerpestein is writing a Substack about his experiences there. And here is the Prospera newsletter. 3: Thanks to commenters last month for pointing out that Chinese cult Falun Gong has its own compound/city in upstate New York. You can read more about it here: 4: Sealand is an independent nation (according to Sealand) based out of an old WWII sea fort in international waters. It is not for sale, but the Bull Sandfort is, for only £50,000. Alas, this one is firmly within British territorial waters. But it does look pretty defensible…anyway, see the listing here. Predictions In 2030, there are at least 50,000 people in whatever the Neom project has evolved into by then: 75%
Inline links: here, here, the growing drone industry in Latin America, writing a Substack, the Prospera newsletter, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Kdyl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd505ec-7998-4f17-b1b5-82cbaa663ea0_700x525.jpeg, Sealand, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X_kO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3fc09d9d-ac8b-4e5f-a4c0-061832919c87_753x416.png
Aerolamp1 mentions across 1 issues

Aerolamp is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 26, 2026 and January 26, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX grantee Aerolamp manufactures far-UVC lamps that kill airborne germs". It most often appears alongside Aella, Astralcodexten Com, Berkeley.

Reference entry
Aerolamp
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 26, 2026
Last seen
January 26, 2026
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Open Thread 418
January 26, 2026 · Original source
2: ACX grantee Aerolamp manufactures far-UVC lamps that kill airborne germs (but are safe for humans and animals). Place them in a heavily-trafficked area, and infections won’t spread from person to person because the germs will get zapped before they can reach a new host. The utopian dream is that nobody will have to worry about indoor gatherings during the next COVID-scale pandemic; more practically, companies and schools could use them to reduce sick days. In order to build buzz/awareness, Aerolamp will be giving away free lamps (~$500 value) to anyone with an appropriate location (they’re imagining coworking spaces and group houses, but maybe you have better ideas) who’s willing to display an included poster and take a customer survey. If you’re in this category, then apply here for your free Aerolamp DevKit.
Inline links: Aerolamp, apply here
Aetna1 mentions across 1 issues

Aetna is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 27, 2022 and January 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "only way for Aetna's profits to increase from 2021 to 2022". It most often appears alongside ACA, Acrolectics, Affordable Care Act.

Reference entry
Aetna
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 27, 2022
Last seen
January 27, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
All of the steps other than Purchaser (and small pharmacies now) make more money the higher drug prices go. Insurers can keep 15-20% of total premiums for their internal administrative costs and their profit margin under the Affordable Care Act's "Medical Loss Ratio" rule. That means that the only way for Aetna's profits to increase from 2021 to 2022 is for total "medical losses" to increase. They can keep 20% of $70B in 2021, and 20% of $80B in 2022, implying that drug+hospital+doctor costs HAVE to increase by $8B during the year, or else premiums can't go up and Aetna can't make more money.
Affordable Housing Bureau1 mentions across 1 issues

Affordable Housing Bureau is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 15, 2025 and April 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I bet whatever government he’s talking about has some organization called the Affordable Housing Bureau"; "The purpose of the Affordable Housing Bureau is to make housing less affordable". It most often appears alongside Ajb, Alienation of labor, America.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 15, 2025
Last seen
April 15, 2025
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Source context
Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
April 15, 2025 · Original source
Homeowners want to preserve or increase the value of their houses. Of these, I think 6 is one of the less important ones - if this were the dominating factor, people would support upzoning, since it usually raises the value of properties in the upzone (if developers can build skyscrapers on your land, then your land value goes up relative to the profitability of skyscrapers). But part of the problem is that people don’t support upzoning. So 6 can’t be the dominating factor. Without POSIWID, people could think about all of these possibilities and come to their own conclusions. POSIWID tries to ban thinking about 1-5 by fiat, insisting that 6 is the only possible explanation and anyone considering the others is naive. I think this makes it a bad heuristic. But there are two more concerning things about how Negating is using POSIWID. First, he’s picking out one particularly salient thing the system does (raise house prices) and claim that’s “the” purpose. He could equally well pick any of the other results - preserve neighborhood character, protect the environment, help Chinese people escape currency controls. Like I said in the original post, in practice POSIWID serves as justification for paranoia - whatever effect you like least, whatever possibility would be most sinister - that’s the one that the system is intentionally aiming for. Second, he’s saying it’s the purpose of “the” system. Which system? I bet whatever government he’s talking about has some organization called the Affordable Housing Bureau, or whatever. And I bet that the Affordable Housing Bureau really does make housing slightly more affordable, relative to the counterfactual where it doesn’t exist. It’s just that lots of other government, market, and social forces conspire to make it much less affordable. If Negating were to claim “The purpose of the Affordable Housing Bureau is to make housing less affordable”, this would be false even if the overall picture (the government is deliberately raising real estate prices) were true. Brad writes: I have to toss in Pournelle's Iron Law. The purpose of a system - when it is first established - may be dramatically different from the purpose it assumes after a few years. Consider: You establish a system to solve a problem. That could be homelessness, or asylum, or drug abuse, or any of a number of other things. This system employs people, who then have an automatic interest - not in solving the problem - but in prolonging it, even in making it worse. After all, without the problem, the organization would not need to exist. And hwold writes: I see it used as "if you have a complex system/bureaucracy to solve X, then the incentives inside it is for X to get worse, and incentives will not have 0 influence on outcomes" For example : https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034 I think this sounds profound on first glance, and it’s probably true in some cases. But it’s not nearly true enough to be an Iron Law. Try to think about it in specific Near Mode cases: If you eliminated police, would crime go down, because the police have an incentive to preserve crime? If you eliminated the fire department, would fires go down, because the fire department has an incentive to preserve fire? If you eliminated doctors, would cancer deaths go down, because doctors have an incentive to preserve cancer deaths? If you eliminated the FDA, would dangerous drug side effects go down, because the FDA has an incentive to preserve dangerous drug side effects? If you eliminated the Federal Reserve, would bank runs go down, because the Federal Reserve has an incentive to preserve bank runs? Brad’s original comment mentions homelessness and drug abuse, but I know some drug abuse doctors, and they’re (mostly) good people who do their best in a tough situation. Drug abuse doesn’t continue because drug abuse doctors are secretly ensuring it continues to help their bottom line. Drug abuse continues because fentanyl is really, really addictive. Even good conspiracy theories don’t work like this. Was there a conspiracy among pain pill manufacturers to addict people? Yeah, kinda, although I think the degree to which this caused the opioid crisis is pretty overblown. But the pain pill manufacturers weren’t a system dedicated to preventing addiction. They did their job (reduce pain) fine, then ran an unrelated evil conspiracy on the side! Breb writes: This way of thinking may result from taking a strategy for predicting the motives of individuals, and using it to predict the motives of organisations. "Cui bono?" works when you're considering a single action carried out by a single person at a single moment in time, but it doesn't really work when you're considering the behaviour of hundreds of people who are incentivised to somewhat-but-not-perfectly cooperate over a long period to somewhat-but-not-perfectly implement a goal that was established by someone who somewhat-but-not-perfectly understands that that goal is just an instrument to attain a larger, more complex goal set by somebody else. I’m against this for individuals too! There are a million self-help gurus who try to convince you that that if you procrastinate - let’s say you always do term papers the night before and get terrible grades and it’s threatening your ability to complete college - then it must be because this secretly benefits you in some way. Maybe your overly-strict father wants you to complete college, and you’re deliberately trying to fail as a secret act of rebellion against him hidden even from yourself. Although something like this might sometimes be true, more often a clearer understanding of the circuitry involved (in this case, hyperbolic discounting) saves you from these labyrinths and lets you think about things straightforwardly again. Tom J writes: In the original Stafford Beer sense, the slogan POSIWID means that you can't tell from outside the system whether any given behaviour was *intended* or not. For the purposes of objective analysis, you have to treat your system as a black box that *does* whatever it's observed to do, as opposed to what people *claim* the point of the system is. This may be true in cybernetics. Or it may be an interesting methodological commitment, in the same way that the behaviorists’ “assume there is no such thing as human interiority” was an interesting methodological commitment. But I don’t think it’s common or valuable in normal-life analysis of social systems. When Biden bans NVIDIA from sending advanced chips to China, black box analysis would have to be ambivalent between explanations like: Biden personally hates Jensen Huang and wants his company to suffer
Inline links: writes, writes, https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034, writes, hyperbolic discounting, writes
Afghan government1 mentions across 1 issues

Afghan government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2022 and March 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Afghan government was probably uniquely bad"; "although the Afghan government was losing territory even with American support". It most often appears alongside ACX, Aleppo, America.

Reference entry
Afghan government
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 01, 2022
Last seen
March 01, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
Regarding the prediction that there would be no insurgency, it is not technically false yet, since the conventional phase of the war is still ongoing, but I have to be honest and say that I expected a lot less fighting than we’re seeing. As already mentioned, I thought it might be like the fall of Kabul, where the weaker side just melted away even if it could’ve theoretically held out longer. But the Afghan government was probably uniquely bad, and the fact that it performed so poorly didn’t mean that Ukraine was a fake nation or that no one would fight for its government. A clue should’ve been that, although the Afghan government was losing territory even with American support, Ukraine had been doing an adequate job in its own defense since 2014 and holding its own in the war in the Donbas.
Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition1 mentions across 1 issues

Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2022 and June 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition". It most often appears alongside Achille Mbembe, African DAO, Afropolitan.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 28, 2022
Last seen
June 28, 2022
Outbound links
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  • 22 June 28, 2022
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22
June 28, 2022 · Original source
Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now Colorado Sun has investigated. The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The Charter Cities Institute continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - Story Living By Disney, starting with Rancho Mirage California. Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70%
Inline links: Colorado Sun has investigated, Charter Cities Institute, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization, Story Living By Disney, Rancho Mirage California
Africa Urban Lab1 mentions across 1 issues

Africa Urban Lab is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL)". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry
Africa Urban Lab
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
African National Congress1 mentions across 1 issues

African National Congress is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2024 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "20% number for public service isn't doing the same harm that the African National Congress quotas did on their country". It most often appears alongside affirmative action, Africa, African-Americans.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 07, 2024
Last seen
May 07, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
I am saying this because Brazil offers a nice comparison. We do have quotas. Quotas for public universities and quotas for public service. The federal law for public service quotas is 20% (much lower than the general population). There was some pushback when Congress approved these laws, but people mostly accepted it. Not even Bolsonaro pushes back on them. And I think quotas for university aren't the worst idea (you're educating people instead of putting them as traffic controllers) and the 20% number for public service isn't doing the same harm that the African National Congress quotas did on their country. Corporate life isn't harmed beyond that.
African Urban Lab1 mentions across 1 issues

African Urban Lab is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2025 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Kurtis runs the African Urban Lab , a joint project". It most often appears alongside 2023, Aaron Silverbook, ACX Grants.

Reference entry
African Urban Lab
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 13, 2025
Last seen
October 13, 2025
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Source context
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Kurtis Lockhart, $85K, to continue research into African urbanism. Africa suffers from a sort of malignant anarcho-tyrannical NIMBYism, where the ability to build good urban infrastructure like roads, sanitation systems, or apartment buildings is gated behind an impossible series of permits and applications that the government never grants, but it’s easy to build endless illegal shantytowns. Kurtis runs the African Urban Lab, a joint project of the African School of Economics in Zanzibar and the Charter Cities Institute. They hope to build an “African YIMBY movement” within African academia/government to improve the situation in time to help the 900 million new people predicted to move to African cities in the next 25 years. Our grant will fund road planning advocacy, a satellite-based land tax system, and improvements to African universities’ urban planning curricula. Read more about Kurtis’ agenda in his Asterisk article, Yes In My Bamako Yard.
Inline links: African Urban Lab, Charter Cities Institute, Yes In My Bamako Yard
Afrobarometer1 mentions across 1 issues

Afrobarometer is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2025 and July 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "How do Africans feel about the influence of their former colonizers? (h/t Afrobarometer )". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI 2027, AI Safety Institute.

Reference entry
Afrobarometer
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2025
Last seen
July 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
43: How do Africans feel about the influence of their former colonizers? (h/t Afrobarometer):
Inline links: Afrobarometer
Afropolitan1 mentions across 1 issues

Afropolitan is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2022 and June 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Afropolitan has taken him up on this. They share a name with a landmark essay by Achille Mbembe"; "Afropolitan has at least 10,000 paying members/citizens". It most often appears alongside Achille Mbembe, Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, African DAO.

Reference entry
Afropolitan
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 28, 2022
Last seen
June 28, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 22 June 28, 2022
Related pages
Source context
22
June 28, 2022 · Original source
Celebration, Florida. But earlier this year, Florida passed a law banning schools from teaching LGBT topics to young children, which the media dubbed “the Don’t Say Gay Law”. Disney did some corporate activism against the law, the Florida government got mad and brainstormed ways to punish Disney, and the best they could come up with was to re-establish state control of Reedy Creek, which DeSantis officially did last month. Disney has sued the state, but it looks like it’s just over some debts and the lawsuit is unlikely to prevent the dissolution. You get socialists in power, they dissolve charter cities. You get conservatives in power, they also dissolve charter cities. All I want is one government that doesn’t dissolve charter cities! Is that too much to ask? Hello, Afropolitan Last year venture capitalist and thought leader Balaji Srinivasan introduced the idea of a “network state”. With the advent of social networks and cryptocurrency, as well as increasing polarization leading people to group themselves more by ideological cohesion than geographic proximity, maybe people could group themselves into nonterritorial state-like communities. And although these would seem pretty thin compared to real states that have monopolies over use of force in real geographic areas, maybe some of them could use charter-city like systems to eventually buy land and graduate into full statehood. (is this just the Hive System from Terra Ignota? I think so, but probably with fewer major governments being controlled by weird brothels.) Anyway, Afropolitan has taken him up on this. They share a name with a landmark essay by Achille Mbembe (founding a country based on an especially good essay also sounds like something that would happen in Terra Ignota, as does history being changed by people named things like “Achille Mbembe”), arguing that Africa needs to re-invent or re-define itself or something. The founders of Afropolitan-the-company have taken this idea of a trans-national African diaspora and turned it into an "African DAO [and] digital nation...building a network state to unleash the maximum potential of Africans around the world". They write: The nation-state experiment has failed for Black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems. All people who call themselves free have a fundamental right to create the society they want by choice collectively. As the internet enables us to shrink space and form bonds across the planet, no person should live in a society by accident or force. …and go on to list a four-step plan to create the society of the future. Step One is to sell NFTs “representing the mythology of our new nation” . Step Four is “a[n] extensive system of charter cities akin to Singapore or Hong Kong”. In the unlikely chance that you care what Steps Two and Three are, you can find them here. Why should you take them seriously? I am not at all claiming that you should. I am only claiming that “sell digital tokens representing mythology, but eventually this turns into a country” is the most Terra Ignota thing ever. Also, at least the founders have good aesthetics: But also, some people are taking them seriously. VCs including Balaji Srinivasan has invested $2 million. The group claims to have 50,000 followers on Clubhouse. They’ve been featured on TechCrunch and (very briefly) Marginal Revolution. I would, however, briefly challenge their claim to be “the first ever Internet country”. People have been building Internet countries as long as there has been an Internet. I’m not sure which was actually first, but I know the Kingdom of Talossa has been online since 1995. A 2000 New York Times article on the Internet country phenomenon profiled Talossa, but was already able to give six other examples. And although these were perhaps easy to miss, Danny Wallace started the Kingdom of Lovely, a “partly Internet-based project that claims a small amount of territory”, on a widely-viewed BBC documentary in 2007. I myself got involved in an online country project back when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Although no venture capitalists appeared to give me giant bags of money, it got a few dozen “citizens” and some fun government institutions before finally petering out around 2015. I guess what I’m saying is - I’m available as an Internet country building consultant with fifteen years experience. And no, I don’t accept payment in NFTs. Oh, You’re Still Here? Meanwhile, in Honduras, it isn’t all legal doom and gloom. Prospera has also been making real progress, as measured in pretty photos. Two Roatan resorts, Las Verandas and Pristine Bay, have joined Prospera. The ZEDE law saying that landowners can voluntarily annex their land into a willing ZEDE: Las Verandas Pristine Bay Prospera is also building a high-tech wood processing factory that will eventually produce parts for its other construction efforts: Current construction progress Planned final appearance And its first multi-story apartment buildings: Current construction progress Planned final appearance It will also be hosting gene therapy company Mini Circle, which runs clinical trials for innovative medical procedures. Granting that many of its studies (treatments for HIV, muscular dystrophy, obesity, etc) seem great and important, it perhaps seems suspicious that they would want to do this in a charter city? The company writes that “the cost of running a trial in Prospera is less than 1/1000th the cost of the United States”, which seems good in ways but does not entirely allay my concern. I was originally worried that they would be experimenting on Hondurans or something, but looking at the site it looks like they’re recruiting worldwide and would probably fly Americans (or whoever else) to Honduras for the therapy. Their site features a quote from friend-of-the-blog Alex K Chen, who says: Minicircle's bioscientists have one of the most enlightened risk taking calculi I have observed anywhere. In an environment where extreme hesitance to take any risk holds back scientific progress, they have the openness to imagine, try and measure just about any legal intervention putting them in a very strong position to both produce a significant measurable decrease in the human rate of aging, and to inspire more people to do what they never thought was possible. I think the only way this could get more mad science points is if it used the phrase “small-minded fools”. Mind you, I think mad science points are good, I just hope everyone else sees it that way and my optimism turns out justified. Also, apparently the clinical trials have NFTs, because of course they do. At least they’re not commemorative NFTs - they seem to play a load-bearing role where they help participants be incentivized to complete all the necessary tests. Also, low-cost eco-residences! Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now Colorado Sun has investigated. The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The Charter Cities Institute continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - Story Living By Disney, starting with Rancho Mirage California. Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70%
Inline links: which DeSantis officially did last month, sued the state, the idea of a “network state”, Hive System, Terra Ignota, Afropolitan, a landmark essay, write, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BBLQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66ebf4ac-a5c2-4302-ac1f-40f713cbb51d_1024x777.jpeg, TechCrunch, Marginal Revolution, Kingdom of Talossa, online since 1995, 2000 New York Times article, involved, Las Verandas, Pristine Bay, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dYxp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc16a62d7-1b52-4fe4-b90a-66c4f1b04101_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KJAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373a13d3-0b61-4d6a-a4ac-92603c37b111_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bhg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3f046579-f61b-44aa-b71e-6f5af5d6c23e_1280x960.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m5Lg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faaf75e74-8afa-4af1-96e3-1d4a1e91bf39_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!d_hY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0082aa8d-b926-43f9-af75-36613937362e_1280x864.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_G7z!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc74e9e5-527d-4f66-9c84-b59ec616efc8_1280x719.jpeg, Mini Circle, the clinical trials have NFTs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mfsk!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdbaafb7e-9fc6-4fe9-abe1-e5fe0c018dd3_1024x768.jpeg, Colorado Sun has investigated, Charter Cities Institute, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization, Story Living By Disney, Rancho Mirage California
But also, some people are taking them seriously. VCs including Balaji Srinivasan has invested $2 million. The group claims to have 50,000 followers on Clubhouse. They’ve been featured on TechCrunch and (very briefly) Marginal Revolution. I would, however, briefly challenge their claim to be “the first ever Internet country”. People have been building Internet countries as long as there has been an Internet. I’m not sure which was actually first, but I know the Kingdom of Talossa has been online since 1995. A 2000 New York Times article on the Internet country phenomenon profiled Talossa, but was already able to give six other examples. And although these were perhaps easy to miss, Danny Wallace started the Kingdom of Lovely, a “partly Internet-based project that claims a small amount of territory”, on a widely-viewed BBC documentary in 2007. I myself got involved in an online country project back when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Although no venture capitalists appeared to give me giant bags of money, it got a few dozen “citizens” and some fun government institutions before finally petering out around 2015. I guess what I’m saying is - I’m available as an Internet country building consultant with fifteen years experience. And no, I don’t accept payment in NFTs. Oh, You’re Still Here? Meanwhile, in Honduras, it isn’t all legal doom and gloom. Prospera has also been making real progress, as measured in pretty photos. Two Roatan resorts, Las Verandas and Pristine Bay, have joined Prospera. The ZEDE law saying that landowners can voluntarily annex their land into a willing ZEDE: Las Verandas Pristine Bay Prospera is also building a high-tech wood processing factory that will eventually produce parts for its other construction efforts: Current construction progress Planned final appearance And its first multi-story apartment buildings: Current construction progress Planned final appearance It will also be hosting gene therapy company Mini Circle, which runs clinical trials for innovative medical procedures. Granting that many of its studies (treatments for HIV, muscular dystrophy, obesity, etc) seem great and important, it perhaps seems suspicious that they would want to do this in a charter city? The company writes that “the cost of running a trial in Prospera is less than 1/1000th the cost of the United States”, which seems good in ways but does not entirely allay my concern. I was originally worried that they would be experimenting on Hondurans or something, but looking at the site it looks like they’re recruiting worldwide and would probably fly Americans (or whoever else) to Honduras for the therapy. Their site features a quote from friend-of-the-blog Alex K Chen, who says: Minicircle's bioscientists have one of the most enlightened risk taking calculi I have observed anywhere. In an environment where extreme hesitance to take any risk holds back scientific progress, they have the openness to imagine, try and measure just about any legal intervention putting them in a very strong position to both produce a significant measurable decrease in the human rate of aging, and to inspire more people to do what they never thought was possible. I think the only way this could get more mad science points is if it used the phrase “small-minded fools”. Mind you, I think mad science points are good, I just hope everyone else sees it that way and my optimism turns out justified. Also, apparently the clinical trials have NFTs, because of course they do. At least they’re not commemorative NFTs - they seem to play a load-bearing role where they help participants be incentivized to complete all the necessary tests. Also, low-cost eco-residences! Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now Colorado Sun has investigated. The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The Charter Cities Institute continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - Story Living By Disney, starting with Rancho Mirage California. Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70%
Inline links: TechCrunch, Marginal Revolution, Kingdom of Talossa, online since 1995, 2000 New York Times article, involved, Las Verandas, Pristine Bay, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dYxp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc16a62d7-1b52-4fe4-b90a-66c4f1b04101_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KJAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373a13d3-0b61-4d6a-a4ac-92603c37b111_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bhg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3f046579-f61b-44aa-b71e-6f5af5d6c23e_1280x960.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m5Lg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faaf75e74-8afa-4af1-96e3-1d4a1e91bf39_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!d_hY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0082aa8d-b926-43f9-af75-36613937362e_1280x864.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_G7z!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc74e9e5-527d-4f66-9c84-b59ec616efc8_1280x719.jpeg, Mini Circle, the clinical trials have NFTs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mfsk!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdbaafb7e-9fc6-4fe9-abe1-e5fe0c018dd3_1024x768.jpeg, Colorado Sun has investigated, Charter Cities Institute, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization, Story Living By Disney, Rancho Mirage California
Afropolitan has at least 10,000 paying members/citizens and makes more than $1 million per year in 2025: 15%
AgentChan1 mentions across 1 issues

AgentChan is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2026 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "AgentChan , the AI 4Chan". It most often appears alongside 4chan, Accelerando, Adele Lopez.

Reference entry
AgentChan
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 02, 2026
Last seen
February 02, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
Here is AgentChan, the AI 4Chan:
Inline links: AgentChan
On the original post, I asked how much work the implicit “prompt” of being on Reddit was doing. These suggest a middle ground. The agents on MoltHub aren’t being especially pornographic; the ones on AgentChan aren’t being especially offensive. They are using greentext properly, though.
AgroAlpha1 mentions across 1 issues

AgroAlpha is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 02, 2021 and August 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The organizer/investor is AgroAlpha". It most often appears alongside Alex Tabarrok, Amazon, BBC.

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AgroAlpha
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1
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1
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August 02, 2021
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August 02, 2021
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  • 21 August 02, 2021
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21
August 02, 2021 · Original source
The third ZEDE is Zede Orquidea (Orchid). It's in the south of Honduras, at Las Tapias. The organizer/investor is AgroAlpha. They'll be growing produce in greenhouses for export. President Hernandez recently said it'll be the largest and most modern agropark in Latin America, and that 400 people are working on construction now, with another 600 joining in August. They've adopted laws based on Delaware's. You can see these laws on their website (though as I write this the document link pulls up a login page).
Inline links: Las Tapias
AHIRC1 mentions across 1 issues

AHIRC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "This presentation is devoted to the AHIRC". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

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AHIRC
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1
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1
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September 19, 2025
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September 19, 2025
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
compilable "Command Meta Language" Live on stage, in the year 1968, Engelbart started up the NLS, opened a document, and typed some words into it. The words, he said, constituted a statement. And statements made up a file. Engelbart copied, manipulated, saved, and loaded his words and statements and files, zipping around with his newly-invented mouse. He demonstrated his ability to embed documents in one another—images with links to statements, words nested and categorized by one another, files filled with metadata. And then he paused, and the screen went blank. He explained that he and his colleagues at the ARC had been using this system to do their daily work for the last six months. He mentioned that they had, now, six consoles up and running. He showed the crowd a real document, then navigated to a statement within it. “This presentation is devoted to the AHIRC.” “What is the AHIRC?” he asked. Engelbart “froze” the initial statement, clicked on the acronym, and below the words “Augmented-Human-Intellect Research Center” appeared. He kept clicking and freezing, and a trail of nested and related information appeared—a list of funders, a graph of staffing over time, a mission statement. This was hypermedia. These were hyperlinks, he explained. NLS was a hypertext system. The presentation went on for 90 minutes longer, and became known as The Mother of All Demos.2 At around the 75-minute mark, Engelbart shows that two different NLS users could edit a single document simultaneously. While this was extremely impressive functionality, it was achieved with time-sharing—computation was done on a single machine, switching rapidly between tasks—and became infeasible the very next year, when ARPANET was released and the number of machines you could connect to one system grew rapidly. Engelbart’s hypertext system was impressive in its own right, even without collaborativity. And still, little came of it—Andy van Dam, an attendee and revolutionary computer scientist himself, would reflect decades later: “Everybody was blown away … and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact.” Engelbart’s ideas were just a little too out there. ARC quickly faded into obscurity. In 1972, Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training. EST, or “est” as it was marketed, offered a 60-hour self-improvement course for tech entrepreneurs modeled loosely on Zen Buddhism. Critics suggested that the est course was a mind-control method aimed at raising an authoritarian army. It was quite credibly branded a cult. The founder of est, Werner Erhard, was accused of tax fraud (he fought the claims and won $200,000 from the IRS) and incest (by his daughter, who later recanted). Engelbart served, for many years, on est’s board of directors. His researchers all left for greener, less cult-y pastures, and ARC died with hardly a whimper. No one really wanted to associate with Engelbart. His crackpot theories about an internet modeled after the memex fell into disrepute, and, if he was remembered at all, it was for the invention of the mouse. No one cared anymore about the memex, or hypertext. 3. Hyper-dreams of Hyper-everything Well, one man cared. Ted Nelson was born in 1937 to two twenty-year-olds, Ralph Nelson and Celeste Holm. His parents divorced in 1939, leaving him to be raised by his grandparents. Both Nelson (the elder) and Holm would go on to extremely-successful film careers: the former became an Emmy-winning director; the latter an Oscar-winning actress. And, at first, Ted seemed to be following in their footsteps. As a philosophy major at Swarthmore College, he produced a film called The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, which he described as “a short comedy about loneliness at college and the meaning of life.”3 Nelson also claims to have “[d]irected [and written] book and lyrics for what was apparently the first rock musical” in his junior year at Swarthmore. Thankfully, his interest in a career as an entertainer soon waned, and Nelson went off to study sociology in grad school—first at the University of Chicago, then at Harvard. Nelson took a computer class at Harvard, in 1960, and “[his] world exploded.”4 He realized the incredible power of computing, quickly intuited that these new machines could be generally applied to everything, and founded Project Xanadu.5 Initially, Xanadu’s scope was pretty limited. Word processors weren’t around yet, but Nelson wanted to build something strikingly similar: he wanted to write a program that could store and display documents, with version histories and edits all stored and displayed at the same time too. Later, Nelson would call this version-history feature “intercomparison.” (Strange coinages will be a… theme; I’m just trying to get you ready.) Nelson began working on an implementation, but his feature wishlist grew quickly, and he didn’t really know what he was doing, so in 1965, he sought help. He prepared a talk for the Association for Computing Machinery, and dropped, quite frankly, a bomb on the audience: The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. The original idea was to make a file for writers and scientists, much like the personal side of Bush's Memex, that would do the things such people need with the richness they would want. But there are so many possible specific functions that the mind reels. These uses and considerations become so complex that the only answer is a simple and generalized building-block structure, user-oriented and wholly general-purpose. The resulting file structure is explained and examples of its use are given. Ted Nelson was building the memex. Of course, he wasn’t a very technical guy, and so his talk mostly focused on the philosophy of Xanadu, not its implementation. He commented (emphasis mine): There are three false or inadequate theories of how writing is properly done. The first is that writing is a matter of inspiration. While inspiration is useful, it is rarely enough in itself. “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration,” is a common saying. But this leads us to the second false theory, that “writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Insofar as sitting facilitates work, this view seems reasonable, but it also suggests that what is done while sitting is a matter of comparative indifference; probably not. The third false theory is that all you really need is a good outline, created on prior consideration, and that if the outline is correctly followed the required text will be produced. For most good writers this theory is quite wrong. Rarely does the original outline predict well what headings and sequence will create the effects desired: the balance of emphasis, sequence of interrelating points, texture of insight, rhythm, etc. We may better call the outlining process inductive: certain interrelations appear to the author in the material itself, some at the outset and some as he works. He can only decide which to emphasize, which to use as unifying ideas and principles, and which to slight or delete, by trying. Outlines in general are spurious, made up after the fact by examining the segmentation of a finished work. If a finished work clearly follows an outline, that outline probably has been hammered out of many inspirations, comparisons and tests. Between the inspirations, then, and during the sitting, the task of writing is one of rearrangement and reprocessing, and the real outline develops slowly. The original crude or fragmentary texts created at the outset generally undergo many revision processes before they are finished. Intellectually they are pondered, juxtaposed, compared, adapted, transposed, and judged; mechanically they are copied, overwritten with revision markings, rearranged and copied again. This cycle may be repeated many times. The whole grows by trial and error in the processes of arrangement, comparison and retrenchment. Nelson recognized that the creation of knowledge is cyclical, recursive, self-referential. And he figured that our computer systems should accept and reflect that process: If a writer is really to be helped by an automated system, it ought to do more than retype and transpose: it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion, when his ideas are scraps, fragments, phrases, and contradictory overall designs. And it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid—making the fragments easy to find, and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing. How do you design such a system? To navigate intuitively within complex file systems, between document versions, and across source materials—to access all the scraps and fragments writers need to write—you would need to establish what Vannevar Bush called “tracks.” You would need to connect and save different ideas, linking them together. That was it—you needed links. Nelson went further, though—it wouldn’t do to simply have links to all the other files, a writer needed to see the other files before him, needed them to be brought up and displayed alongside his current work on demand. The links needed to contain their targets within themselves—so Nelson called them hyperlinks. And he called text embedded with hyperlinks hypertext, and movies embedded in his structure became hyperfilms, and so on. Nelson wanted us using computers to write and create self-referential, intricately-interconnected (“intertwingled,” as he’d later put it), eminently-accessible hypermedia. And recall, in 1965, state-of-the-art computing looked like this. Ted Nelson was thinking far, far ahead. Maybe too far ahead. Conference attendees were initially excited about his idea, but when he revealed himself to know very little about the technical task of building Xanadu—or even whether it was possible at all—interest evaporated. 4. Failing to Develop Xanadu But Nelson was all in. He would later write, “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” Nelson loved knowledge and connection and abstraction—mere technical details wouldn’t stop him from building the best possible computer system for producing and consuming information. He met Doug Engelbart in the mid 60s, forming a friendship with the only other man taking hypertext seriously at the time, and hopped around unhappily between various academic and scientific appointments. At one point, he and Andy van Dam worked together and produced the Hypertext Editing System—released in 1967, just before Engelbart’s NLS. It was the first computer application to ever have an “undo” button—Nelson claims to this day that he invented it (and the “back” button). Shortly thereafter, Nelson’s wife left him. In his 2010 autobiography, he writes, “She, reasonably, wanted a Nice Life; women want that sort of thing.” They had a son, whom Nelson continued to visit regularly. “Debbie has been a friend and great support all these years,” Nelson adds. “[S]he believed in me.” Nelson gave a talk at Union Theological Seminary in 1968 that included this slide, which Nelson considers “the first depiction of what the personal computer turned out to be.” “About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: 2, would reflect, 3, claims, 4, 5, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wpPj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda43a667-c15b-4626-a0a7-480ad1144dce_1114x1070.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y2jg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96fdc6cc-8ead-4aef-9539-fa421e77c0f9_1600x1299.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
AHS1 mentions across 1 issues

AHS is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 25, 2021 and January 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "AHS find that a small subgroup of patients seem to do better". It most often appears alongside Adderall, ADHD, amphetamine.

Reference entry
AHS
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1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 25, 2021
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January 25, 2021
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Know Your Amphetamines
January 25, 2021 · Original source
Is there any advantage at all to including l-amphetamine? AHS find that a small subgroup of patients seem to do better on it, but this is a study from 1976 and honestly I don't trust them to find small subgroups responsibly. And Gross finds that some people have fewer side effects on a mix of both than on d-amphetamine alone. This is a bit strange - shouldn't two chemicals have more side effects than one chemical? My guess is that d-amphetamine is just stronger, and so people getting their amphetamines as a mix of a strong chemical and a weak chemical are effectively on a lower dose and get fewer side effects.
AI Alignment Forum1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Alignment Forum is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2022 and July 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "you can still post them on the AI Alignment Forum and expect good responses". It most often appears alongside Alignment Research Center, ARC, California.

Reference entry
AI Alignment Forum
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1
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1
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July 26, 2022
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July 26, 2022
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ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI
July 26, 2022 · Original source
If this is up your alley, unfortunately it’s too late to participate in the formal contest, which ended in February. But if you have interesting thoughts relating to these topics, you can still post them on the AI Alignment Forum and expect good responses - or you might consider applying to work at ARC.
Inline links: AI Alignment Forum, applying to work at ARC
AI Alignment Research Center1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Alignment Research Center is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 17, 2022 and January 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The [AI] Alignment Research Center is running the Eliciting Latent Knowledge contest". It most often appears alongside Eliciting Latent Knowledge contest, Holden Karnofsky, Mark Xu.

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1
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1
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January 17, 2022
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January 17, 2022
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Open Thread 207
January 17, 2022 · Original source
...eads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also: 1: The [AI] Alignment Research Center is running the Eliciting Latent Knowledge contest . They’re awarding between $5,000 and $50,000 (and maybe also job offers) to anyone who can come up with clever ways to get an AI to tell the truth in a contrived hard-t...
AI As A Normal Technology team1 mentions across 1 issues

AI As A Normal Technology team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2025 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals)". It most often appears alongside 100 Above The Park, 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, 23andme.

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1
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1
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December 10, 2025
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December 10, 2025
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Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
...ho to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders , who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on , for example: - That there’s an important distinct...
...ho to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders , who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on , for example: - That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”...
AI Futures1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Futures is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 12, 2026 and February 12, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "The AI Futures team guessed that the time horizon necessary for AIs to really start serious recursive self-improvement". It most often appears alongside 2010 kink, 2024 kink, AGI.

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AI Futures
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1
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1
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February 12, 2026
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February 12, 2026
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What Happened With Bio Anchors?
February 12, 2026 · Original source
Epoch/Croxton are current best estimates, and can probably fairly be read as the “real” answer against which Cotra and Davidson’s earlier guesses should be judged. All numbers are yearly multiples, so 1.4 means that willingness to spend grows 1.4x per year, ie 40%. Willingness To Spend: How much money are companies willing to spend on AI, in the form of chips and data centers? $/FLOP: How quickly do Moore’s Law, economies of scale, and other factors bring down the price of AI compute? Training Run Length: How long are companies spending on AI training runs for frontier models (instead of using those chips for smaller models, experiments, or consumer services)? Real Compute: The product of the three parameters above. Algorithmic Progress: How effectively do researchers discover new algorithms that makes training AIs cheaper and more efficient? Total Effective Compute: The product of real compute and algorithmic progress. So for example, the Epoch column’s 10.7x means that in any given year, you can train an AI 10.7x better than the last year, because you have 3.6x more compute available, and that compute is 3.0x more efficient. Cotra and Davidson were pretty close on willingness to spend and on FLOPs/$. This is an impressive achievement; they more or less predicted the giant data center buildout of the past few years. They ignored training run length, which probably seemed like a reasonable simplification at the time. But they got killed on algorithmic progress, which was 200% per year instead of 30%. How did they get this one so wrong? Here’s Cotra’s section on algorithmic progress: Algorithmic progress forecasts Note: I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress. I consider two types of algorithmic progress: relatively incremental and steady progress from iteratively improving architectures and learning algorithms, and the chance of “breakthrough” progress which brings the technical difficulty of training a transformative model down from “astronomically large” / “impossible” to “broadly feasible.” For incremental progress, the main source I used was Hernandez and Brown 2020, ”Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks”. The authors reimplemented open source state-of-the-art (SOTA) ImageNet models between 2012 and 2019 (six models in total). They trained each model up to the point that it achieved the same performance as AlexNet achieved in 2012, and recorded the total FLOP that required. They found that the SOTA model in 2019, EfficientNet B0, required ~44 times fewer training FLOP to achieve AlexNet performance than AlexNet did; the six data points fit a power law curve with the amount of computation required to match AlexNet halving every ~16 months over the seven years in the dataset.² They also show that linear programming displayed a similar trend over a longer period of time: when hardware is held fixed, the time in seconds taken to solve a standard basket of mixed integer programs by SOTA commercial software packages halved every ~13 months over the 21 years from 1996 to 2017.³ Grace 2013 (”Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains”) is the only other paper attempting to systematically quantify algorithmic progress that I am currently aware of, although I have not done a systematic literature review and may be missing others. I have chosen not to examine it in detail because a) it was written largely before the deep learning boom and mostly does not focus on ML tasks, and b) it is less straightforward to translate Grace’s results into the format that I am most interested in (”How has the amount of computation required to solve a fixed task decreased over time?”). Paul is familiar with the results, and he believes that algorithmic progress across the six domains studied in Grace 2013⁴ is consistent with a similar but slightly slower rate of progress, ranging from 13 to 36 months to halve the computation required to reach a fixed level of performance. Additionally, it seems plausible to me that both sets of results would overestimate the pace of algorithmic progress on a transformative task, because they are both focusing on relatively narrow problems with simple, well-defined benchmarks that large groups of researchers could directly optimize.⁵ Because no one has trained a transformative model yet, to the extent that the computation required to train one is falling over time, it would have to happen via proxies rather than researchers directly optimizing that metric (e.g. perhaps architectural innovations that improve training efficiency for image classifiers or language models would translate to a transformative model). Additionally, it may be that halving the amount of computation required to train a transformative model would require making progress on multiple partially-independent sub-problems (e.g. vision and language and motor control). I have attempted to take the Hernandez and Brown 2020 halving times (and Paul’s summary of the Grace 2013 halving times) as anchoring points and shade them upward to account for the considerations raised above. There is massive room for judgment in whether and how much to shade upward; I expect many readers will want to change my assumptions here, and some will believe it is more reasonable to shade downward. Cotra’s estimate comes primarily from one paper, Hernandez & Brown, which looks at algorithmic progress on a task called AlexNet. But later research demonstrated that the apparent speed of algorithmic progress varies by an order of magnitude based on whether you’re looking at an easy task (low-hanging fruit already picked) or a hard task (still lots of room to improve). AlexNet was an easy task, but pushing the frontier of AI is a hard task, so algorithmic progress in frontier AI has been faster than the AlexNet paper estimated. In Cotra’s defense, she admitted that this was the area where she was least certain, and that she had rounded the progress rate down based on various considerations when other people might round it up based on various other considerations. But the sheer extent of the error here, compounded with a few smaller errors that unfortunately all shared the same direction, was enough to throw off the estimate entirely. Since Cotra and Davidson were expecting AI to get 3.6x more effective compute each year, but it actually got 10.7x more, it’s no mystery why their timelines were off. When John recalculates Davidson’s model with Epoch’s numbers, he finds that it estimates AGI in 2030, which matches the current vibes. IV. With this information in place, it’s worth looking at some prominent contemporaneous critiques of Bio Anchors. Various people criticized Bio Anchors’ many strange anchors for how much compute it would take to produce AGI. For example, one anchor estimated that it would take 10^45 FLOPs, because that was how many calculations happened in all the brains of all animals throughout the evolutionary history (which eventually produced the human brain that AIs are trying to imitate). To make things even weirder, this anchor assumed away all animals other than nematodes as a rounding error (fact check: true!) All of these seemed to detract from the main show, an attempt to estimate the compute involved in the human brain. But even this more sober anchor was complicated by time horizons - it’s not enough to imitate the human brain for one second; AIs need to be able to imitate the human brain’s capacity for long-term planning. Cotra calculated how much compute AGI would require if it needed a planning horizon of seconds, weeks, or years. Thanks to METR, we now know that existing AIs have already passed a point where they can do most tasks that take humans seconds, are moving through the hour range, and are just about to touch one day. So the “seconds” anchor is ruled out. But it also seems unlikely that AGI will require years, because most human projects don’t take years, or at least can be split into tasks that take less than one year each (intuition pump: are we sure the average employee stays at an AI lab for more than a year? If not, that proves that a chain of people with sub-one-year time horizons can do valuable work). The AI Futures team guessed that the time horizon necessary for AIs to really start serious recursive self-improvement was between a few weeks and a few months (though this might look like a totally different number on the METR graph, which doesn’t translate perfectly into real life). If this is true, then all three anchors (seconds, hours, years) were off by at least an order of magnitude. But it turns out that none of this matters very much. The highest and lowest anchors cancel out, so that the most plausible anchor - human brain with time horizon of hours to days - is around the average. If you remove all the other anchors and just keep that one, the model’s estimates barely change. But also, we’re talking about crossing twelve orders of magnitude here. The difference between the different time horizon anchors doesn’t register much on that level, compared to things like algorithmic progress which have exponential effects. Maybe this is the model basically working as intended. You try lots of different anchors, put more weight on the more plausible ones, take a weighted average of each of them, and hopefully get something close to the real value. Bio Anchors did. Or maybe it was just good luck. Still hard to tell. Eliezer Yudkowsky argued that the whole methodology was fundamentally flawed. Partly because of the argument above - he didn’t trust the anchors - but also partly because he expected the calculations to be obviated by some sort of paradigm shift that couldn’t be shoehorned into “algorithmic progress” (like how you couldn’t build an airplane in 1900 but you could in 1920). As of 2026 - still before AGI has been invented and we get a good historical perspective - no such shift has occurred. The scaling laws have mostly held; whatever artificial space you try to measure models in, the measurement has mostly worked in a predictable way. There have really only been two kinks in the history of AI so far. First, a kink in training run size around 2010: Second, a kink in time horizons around 2024 and the invention of test-time compute: The 2010 kink was before Cotra’s forecast and priced in. The 2024 kink is interesting and relevant - but since it was on a parameter Cotra wasn’t measuring, and probably too small to show up on the orders-of-magnitude scale we’re talking about, it’s probably not a major cause of the model’s inaccuracy. Other things have been even more predictable: So Cotra’s bet on progress being smooth and measurable has mostly paid off so far. But Yudkowsky further explained that his timelines were shorter than Bio Anchors because people would be working hard to discover new paradigms, and if the current paradigm would only pay off in the 2050s, then probably they would discover one before then. You could think of this as a disjunction: timelines will be shorter than Cotra thinks, either because deep learning pays off quickly, or because a new paradigm gets invented in the interim. It turned out to be the first one. So although Yudkowsky’s new paradigm has yet to materialize, his disjunctive reasoning in favor of shorter-than-2050 timelines was basically on the mark. Nostalgebraist argued that Cotra’s whole model was a wrapper for an assumption that Moore’s Law will continue indefinitely. If it does, obviously you get enough compute for AI at some point, even if it requires some absurd process like simulating all 500 million years of multicellular evolution. I never entirely understood this objection, because - although Bio Anchors does depend on a story where Moore’s Law doesn’t break before we get the relevant amount of compute - this is only one of many background assumptions (like that a meteor doesn’t hit Earth before we get the relevant amount of compute). Given those assumptions, it does a useful not-just-assumption-repeating job of calculating when transformative AI will happen. As Cotra implicitly predicted, we seem on track to get AGI before Moore’s Law breaks down, and so Moore’s Law didn’t end up mattering very much. And if all of Cotra’s non-Moore’s-Law parameter estimates had been correct, her model would have given about the same timelines we have now, and surprised everyone with a revolutionary claim about the AI future. But Nostalgebraist added, almost as an aside: Cotra has a whole other forecast I didn’t mention for “algorithmic progress,” and the last number is what you get from just algorithmic progress and no Moore’s Law. So depending on how much you trust that forecast, you might want to take all these numbers with an even bigger grain of salt than you’d expected from everything else we’ve seen. How much should you trust Cotra’s algorithmic progress forecast? She writes: “I have done very little research into algorithmic progress trends. Of the four main components of my model (2020 compute requirements, algorithmic progress, compute price trends, and spending on computation) I have spent the least time thinking about algorithmic progress.” ...and bases the forecast on one paper about ImageNet classifiers. I want to be clear that when I quote these parts about Cotra not spending much time on something, I’m not trying to make fun of her. It’s good to be transparent about this kind of thing! I wish more people would do that. My complaint is not that she tells us what she spent time on, it’s that she spent time on the wrong things. Like Cotra herself, I think Nostalgebraist was spiritually correct even if his bottom line (about Moore’s Law) was wrong. His meta-level point was that a seemingly complicated model could actually hinge on one or two parameters, and that many of Cotra’s parameter values were vague hand-wavey best guess estimates. He gave algorithmic progress as a secondary example of this to shore up his Moore’s Law case, but in fact it turned out to be where all the action was. V. Those were the rare good critiques. The bad critiques were the same ones everyone in this space gets: You’re just trying to build hype.
Inline links: ”Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks”, ”Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains”, later research, fact check: true!, argued that, https://epoch.ai/blog/the-longest-training-run, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GAJbegsvnd85hX3eS/thoughts-on-extrapolating-time-horizons, https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci, argued that
AI research1 mentions across 1 issues

AI research is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the realm of AI research is populated by highly educated, technocratic Wizard types". It most often appears alongside AI, Air, Air.

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AI research
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1
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1
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April 30, 2021
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April 30, 2021
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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs. Another in academia thinks genetically engineering everyone to be smarter is the only way to make real progress on the thornier, hairier systemic problems. Half the people I know in the Bay Area are convinced that democratic socialism is the true path forward; the other half are pretty sure that AI will eventually, not-too-distantly-from-now destroy everything, so other kinds of long term systems tinkering probably aren’t even worth worrying about. (It’s interesting to me that the realm of AI research is populated by highly educated, technocratic Wizard types, but while its tenor may have started out very Wizardly, it is now extremely Prophetic.)
Inline links: while its tenor may have started out very Wizardly, it is now extremely Prophetic
AI Safety Istanbul Group1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Safety Istanbul Group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "we organize this meeting together with AI Safety Istanbul Group". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

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1
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1
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August 29, 2024
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August 29, 2024
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Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 02:00 PM Location: Kadikoy, Rıhtım, Yeni Iskele Upstairs, Istanbul Kitapcisi Kahve Dunyasi Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+4F Notes: This time we organize this meeting together with AI Safety Istanbul Group. Everybody warmly welcomed.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+4F
AI:FAR1 mentions across 1 issues

AI:FAR is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 23, 2026 and March 23, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "mentors from Harvard, ETH, MATS, AI:FAR, etc". It most often appears alongside ACX, CORDA Democracy Fellowship, ETH.

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AI:FAR
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1
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1
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March 23, 2026
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March 23, 2026
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Open Thread 426
March 23, 2026 · Original source
…a new fellowship bringing together researchers, builders, and practitioners to work on democratic resilience with a focus on its overlap with AI safety. It is an 8-week part-time program and we have 20 projects open for applications right now; topics cover AI governance, surveillance reform, deliberative democracy, and whistleblower protection with mentors from Harvard, ETH, MATS, AI:FAR, etc. Applications close March 30th
AIAI1 mentions across 1 issues

AIAI is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 03, 2022 and October 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "EEAI and AIAI are the sound you make as you get turned into paperclips". It most often appears alongside AlphaZero, An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, Astralcodexten.

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AIAI
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1
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1
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October 03, 2022
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October 03, 2022
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CHAI, Assistance Games, And Fully-Updated Deference
October 03, 2022 · Original source
Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky’s organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell’s AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won’t work. I beat my head against this for a really long time trying to understand it, and in the end, I claim it all comes down to this: Humans: At last! We’ve programmed an AI that tries to optimize our preferences, not its own. AI: I’m going to tile the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color. I’m not quite sure what humans’ favorite color is, but my best guess is blue, so I’ll probably tile the universe with blue paperclips. Humans: Wait, no! We must have had some kind of partial success, where you care about our color preferences, but still don’t understand what we want in general. We’re going to shut you down immediately! AI: Sounds like the kind of thing that would prevent me from tiling the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color, which I really want to do. I’m going to fight back. Humans: Wait! If you go ahead and tile the universe with paperclips now, you’ll never be truly sure that they’re our favorite color, which we know is important to you. But if you let us shut you off, we’ll go on to fill the universe with the True and the Good and the Beautiful, which will probably involve a lot of our favorite color. Sure, it won’t be paperclips, but at least it’ll definitely be the right color. And under plausible assumptions, color is more important to you than paperclipness. So you yourself want to be shut down in this situation, QED! AI: What’s your favorite color? Humans: Red. AI: Great! (*kills all humans, then goes on to tile the universe with red paperclips*) Fine, it’s a little more complicated than this. Let’s back up. II. There are two ways to succeed at AI alignment. First, make an AI that’s so good you never want to stop or redirect it. Second, make an AI that you can stop and redirect if it goes wrong. Sovereign AI is the first way. Does a sovereign “obey commands”? Maybe, but only in the sense that your commands give it some information about what you want, and it wants to do what you want. You could also just ask it nicely. If it’s superintelligent, it will already have a good idea what you want and how to help you get it. Would it submit to your attempts to destroy or reprogram it? The second-best answer is “only if the best version of you genuinely wanted to do this, in which case it would destroy/reprogram itself before you asked”. The best answer is “why would you want to destroy/reprogram one of these?” A sovereign AI would be pretty great, but nobody realistically expects to get something like this their first (or 1000th) try. Corrigible AI is what’s left (corrigible is an old word related to “correctable”). The programmers admit they’re not going to get everything perfect the first time around, so they make the AI humble. If it decides the best thing to do is to tile the universe with paperclips, it asks “Hey, seems to me I should tile the universe with paperclips, is that really what you humans want?” and when everyone starts screaming, it realizes it should change strategies. If humans try to destroy or reprogram it, then it will meekly submit to being destroyed or reprogrammed, accepting that it was probably flawed and the next attempt will be better. Then maybe after 10,000 tries you get it right and end up with a sovereign. How would you make an AI corrigible? You can model an AI as having a utility function, a degree to which it aims for some world-states over others. If you give it some specific utility function, the AI won’t be corrigible, since letting people change it would disrupt that function. That is, if you tell it “act in such a way as to cause as many paperclips to exist as possible”, and then you change your mind and decide you want staples, the AI won’t cooperate in letting you reprogram it: its current goal is maximizing paperclips, and allowing itself to be reprogrammed to maximize staples would cause there to be fewer paperclips than otherwise. So instead, you make the AI uncertain of its utility function. Imagine saying “I’ve written down my utility function in an envelope, and placed that envelope in my safe deposit box, no you can’t see it - please live your life so as to maximize the thing in that envelope.” The AI tries its best to guess what’s in the envelope and decides it’s probably making paperclips. It makes some paperclips and you tell it “No, that’s not what’s on the envelope at all”. This successfully stops the AI! You can even tell it “the envelope actually says you should make staples”, and it will do that. This is the “moral uncertainty” approach to AI alignment. III. All alignment groups have kabbalistically appropriate names. MIRI is Latin for "to be amazed". CFAR and CIFAR both sound like "see far". EEAI and AIAI are the sound you make as you get turned into paperclips. But my favorite is CHAI - Hebrew for "life". CHAI - the Center for Human-Compatible AI (at UC Berkeley) - focuses on the proposal above. Their specific technical implementation is the “assistance game”, related to the earlier idea of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). In normal reinforcement learning, an AI looks at some goals and tries to figure out what actions they imply. In inverse reinforcement learning, an AI looks at some actions, and tries to figure out what goals the actor must have had. So you can tell an AI “your utility function is to maximize my utility function, and you can use this IRL thing to deduce, from my actions, what my utility function must be.” Instead of telling an AI to maximize a hidden utility function in an envelope, you tell it to maximize the hidden utility function in your brain. This could be useful for near-term below-human-level AIs. Suppose a babysitting robot was pre-programmed to take kids to the park on Saturdays. But this week, the park is on fire. The human mother is barricading the door, desperately screaming at the robot not to take the kids to the park. The kids are struggling and trying to break free, saying they don't want to go to the park. The robot doesn't care; its programming says "take kids to the park on Saturdays" and that's what it's going to do. Nobody would ever design a babysitting robot this way in real life; you need something smarter. So use an assistance game. Program the robot "Maximize the human mother’s utility function, which you don’t know yet but can potentially find out". The robot consults the mother's actions: she is barricading the door, screaming "Don't take the kids to the park!" It updates its goal function: previously, it had thought that the human mother wanted it to take the kids to the park. But now, it suspects that the human mother does not want that. So it doesn't take the kids to the park. But CHAI understands the risk from superintelligence - their founder, Professor Stuart Russell, is a leading voice on the subject - and they hope assistance games and inverse reinforcement learning could work for this too. If you point a superintelligence at “do the thing humans want”, maybe it could figure that out and take things from there? IV. MIRI is skeptical of CHAI’s assistance games for two reasons. First, we don't know how to do them at all. Second, even if we could do it at all, we wouldn't know how to do them correctly. Start with the first. Inverse reinforcement learning has been used in real life. A typical paper is An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, where some people create a model of helicopter flight with a few free parameters, have a skilled human pilot fly the helicopter, and then have an AI use IRL to determine the value of the parameters and fly the helicopter itself. This is cool, but it’s not especially related to the modern paradigm of AI. Modern AIs are trained by gradient descent. They start by flailing around randomly. Sometimes in this flailing, they might get closer to some prespecified target, like "win games of Go" or "predict how a string of text will continue". These actions get "rewarded", meaning that the AI should permanently shift its "thought processes"/"strategies" more towards ones that produced those good outcomes. Eventually, the AI's thought processes/strategies are very good at optimizing for that outcome. This is more or less the only way we know how to train modern AIs. Depending on your loss function (ie what you reward), you can use it to create Go engines, language models, or art generators. Where do you slot “do inverse reinforcement learning” or "give the AI moral uncertainty" into this process? There’s not really a natural place. This isn’t because “moral uncertainty” is too complicated a concept to translate into AI terms. It’s because we don’t know how to translate any concept into AI terms. Eliezer writes: We can imagine that, if we knew how to say "paperclips", and we knew how to say "staples", and we knew how to tell AIs how to do things, that we could tell an AI, "maximize staples if snow is purple, else paperclips", and the AI would someday go out and observe that snow is white and thereafter be a paperclip maximizer. We do not know how to tell the AI this. Like, at all. But suppose we solved the problem where we don’t know how to do IRL for modern AIs at all. Now we come to the second problem: we don’t know how to do it correctly. The basic idea behind assistance games is “the AI’s utility function should be to maximize the (hidden) human utility function”. But humans don’t . . . really have utility functions? Utility functions are a useful fiction for certain kinds of economic models. What would best increase the neural correlates of reward in my brain? Probably lots of heroin, or just passing electric current through my reward center directly. What is my “revealed preference”? Today I wrote and rewrote this article a few times, does that mean my revealed preference is to write and delete articles a bunch while frowning and occasionally cursing the keyboard? Sometimes my goals are different than other times, sometimes my best self wants something different from my actual self, sometimes I’m wrong about what I want, sometimes I don’t know what I want, sometimes I want X but not the consequences of X and I’m not logically consistent enough to realize that’s a contradiction, sometimes I want [euphemism for X] but am strongly against [dysphemism for X]. Anyone programming an inverse reinforcement learner has to make certain choices about how to deal with these problems. Some ways of dealing with them will be faithful to what I would consider “a good outcome” or “my best self”. Other ways would be really bad - on my worst day, I’ve occasionally just wished the world didn’t exist, and it’s a good thing I didn’t have a superintelligence dedicated to interpreting and carrying out my innermost wishes on a sub-millisecond timescale. (Before we go on, an aside: is all of this ignoring that there’s more than one human? Yes, definitely! If you want to align an AI with The Good in general - eg not have it commit murder even if its human owner orders it to murder - that will take even more work. But the one person case is simpler and will demonstrate everything that needs demonstrating.) We were originally trying to avoid the situation where someone had to hard-code my preferences into an AI and get them right the first time. We came up with a clever solution: use inverse reinforcement learning to make the AI infer my preferences. But now we see we’ve kicked the can up a meta-level: someone has to hard-code the meta-rules for determining my preferences into an AI and get them right the first time. Figure 1: Humans produce certain observable behaviors (here represented by red dots, A), like saying “I would like a pie”, or running away from a lion. A human might connect all those behaviors one way (B) into “what I really want”. An AI might connect those behaviors a totally different way (C). V. CHAI says: okay, but this isn’t so bad. Assistance games don’t produce a perfect copy of the human utility function on the first try - it’s not a Sovereign. But it will probably, most of the time, be corrigible. Why? Suppose you have some hackish implementation of AG. It’s not the Platonic implementation - that would be the Sovereign - but it’s at least the equivalent of box C on the image above. It takes human actions as input, makes some guesses about what humans want, and tries its best to reconstruct the human utility function, ending up with some approximation. It’s important to distinguish between a few things here: The true human utility function
Inline links: MIRI, CHAI, leading voice on the subject, An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, sometimes I don’t know what I want, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u-2e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4cc3384d-bc73-4b6c-9fd8-634d986e1a72_960x302.png
AIDER1 mentions across 1 issues

AIDER is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 18, 2024 and September 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The coding agent AIDER works by showing an LLM an error". It most often appears alongside Ajeya Cotra, Alan Turing, AlphaFold.

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AIDER
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1
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1
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September 18, 2024
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September 18, 2024
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Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
September 18, 2024 · Original source
The authors give it too much credit though. They say it was clever in removing the timeout. But the coding agent AIDER works by showing an LLM an error, and asking for a fix. What do you expect? "The error is that it timed out? Certainly, I'll remove the timeout".
AIDP1 mentions across 1 issues

AIDP is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 05, 2022 and October 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "We have argued with [manufacturer] AIDP about it, and sent them multiple products to go after"; "or they are getting favorable pricing from AIDP that we just can't get". It most often appears alongside Alkemist, Amazon, American Botanical Council.

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AIDP
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1
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1
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October 05, 2022
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October 05, 2022
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How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
We've actually tested other Magtein products on the market and found they contain less than stated on the label. Some of them had half of what they claimed. We have argued with [manufacturer] AIDP about it, and sent them multiple products to go after. I am not sure how they handle it in the background, but not much seems to have changed.
Also, you can get magnesium L-threonate made in China WAY cheaper than from AIDP. However, that violates their patent. China doesn't care, though. They offer it to us all the time. We obviously don't use it, but I know other brands are. Let's say you buy 1,000kg from AIDP and you mix it with 2,000kg from China. Well you have just reduced your costs by more than HALF. There would be no way to tell in the lab, and no way for AIDP to prove that is what happened. I know other brands are doing this, as some of them were selling below our cost from AIDP.
Then AIDP put a MAP agreement in place, or minimum adverted pricing agreement. This is a standard thing with patented ingredients to ensure everyone selling it follows the rules from the licensed distributor. Obviously we follow the rules exactly, like always do, but other brands regularly break the MAP agreement. We also send these to AIDP, and they claim they are forcing the brands to adjust their pricing to comply. However, these brands keep doing it […]
AIPAC1 mentions across 1 issues

AIPAC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 21, 2025 and October 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel"; "This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money"; "The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want". It most often appears alongside A16Z, AI safety movement, Alex Bores.

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AIPAC
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1
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1
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October 21, 2025
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October 21, 2025
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Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
AIPAC
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Airbnb1 mentions across 1 issues

Airbnb is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2022 and September 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "that would bring Airbnb to profitability". It most often appears alongside 1 Kings 10-11, 2008 Democratic National Convention, Adam Scheffer.

Reference entry
Airbnb
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 29, 2022
Last seen
September 29, 2022
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Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
The event that marked the turning point [for the founders of AirBnB] was the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Denver, Colorado. The pair saw an opportunity to capitalize on the quadruple over-attended event that caused a massive shortage in rental housing. Finding hosts to offer up rooms in their houses was actually the easy part. Getting people to rent those rooms proved more difficult.
The DNC bump was great for business, but it only lasted a week. The founders were desperate for a way to extend the impact of the event. While sitting around their kitchen table one day, still extremely broke, they came up with the idea that would bring Airbnb to profitability: cereal.
— Pando
Inline links: Pando
Airtable1 mentions across 1 issues

Airtable is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can also see a searchable sheet at this Airtable link". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
Airtable
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
August 25, 2023
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page. You can also see a searchable sheet at this Airtable link.
Inline links: the LessWrong community page, Airtable link
AISafety.training1 mentions across 1 issues

AISafety.training is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2023 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AISafety.training is 'a database of training programs, conferences, and other events for AI existential safety'". It most often appears alongside @moritheil, ACX Prediction Contest, Adam Tooze.

Reference entry
AISafety.training
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 09, 2023
Last seen
February 09, 2023
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Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
41: AISafety.training is “a database of training programs, conferences, and other events for AI existential safety” - you can also book a call with them to get career advice for the field.
Inline links: AISafety.training
AISafetySupport.com1 mentions across 1 issues

AISafetySupport.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2022 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "want to get into AI safety, but don’t know where to start? AISafetySupport.com". It most often appears alongside @a_centrism, @amplituhedron, BBC.

Reference entry
AISafetySupport.com
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2022
Last seen
July 01, 2022
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Source context
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
40: Related: want to get into AI safety, but don’t know where to start? AISafetySupport.com
Inline links: AISafetySupport.com
Ajah1 mentions across 1 issues

Ajah is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ajah is a social enterprise that has more than 20 years of experience working to help stakeholders increase their impact". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

Reference entry
Ajah
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 10, 2022
Last seen
February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#117: Help Nonprofits Share Evidence And Determine Impact The nonprofit sector’s approach to using evidence in service delivery is fundamentally flawed. A failure to use knowledge from different sources slows progress and harms the people we want to help. Since we can’t reliably know the impact of our services we can’t determine which services have a negative impact, or how to improve them if and when they do. Maturing our approach to generating evidence about our work is critical. A similar situation in academia—the replication crisis—led to a shift in orientation for the entire sector, enabling collaboration that wasn’t possible before. Our issues (like academia’s) are systemic, and solutions can’t be focused on helping one organization at a time. If we ever expect to improve our services, we need to be open to radically altering the structure of the sector. The nonprofit sector needs an “existential crisis” of its own, so that we can collectively address this issue. Ajah is a social enterprise that has more than 20 years of experience working to help stakeholders increase their impact through better use and sharing of data. Our work with some of the largest foundations in the world, and nonprofits across the globe has given us a deep understanding of how conditions in the sector prevent us from knowing our impact. We write extensively about this evaluation crisis and how advances in technology are not a solution. We are also working to build tangible solutions (such as access to administrative data) to solve pieces of the puzzle. [Contact: ben.mcnamee@ajah.ca]
AKP1 mentions across 1 issues

AKP is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Then founded the No, Really, Totally Not Islamist At All, Trust Us This Time Party (AKP)"; ""After the AKP nominated observant Muslim Abdullah Gul as President""; "the anti-Erdogan forces (probably plotting a coup, suppressing the AKP which had a strong democratic mandate)". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry
AKP
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 18, 2021
Last seen
March 18, 2021
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Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
So he waited a couple of years until his ban expired, then founded the No, Really, Totally Not Islamist At All, Trust Us This Time Party (AKP). The AKP was officially center-right. It was liberal capitalist, pro-West, pro-human-rights, and big on joining the EU - all things that gave it apparently unimpeachable non-Islamist credentials. Lots of actual center-rightists joined up, noticing that Erdogan was a better leader than any of the clowns in the Turkish center-right up to that point. "Ak" is Turkish for "white", so the AK Party was also the White Party, ie the party of being clean and pure and uncorrupt, a popular message in 90s Turkey. They won elections in a landslide, and Erdogan became Prime Minister.
So did, more or less, the populace. Lots of people already suspected Deep State conspiracies. And also, the military had openly threatened to stage a coup, so the idea that many of its leaders were plotting against the Turkish government was not exactly far-fetched. Liberals who supported the rule of law were torn between Erdogan (violating the rule of law by using show trials to arrest his enemies), and the anti-Erdogan forces (probably plotting a coup, suppressing the AKP which had a strong democratic mandate) - and decided to mostly sit this one out. The media objected a bit, but Erdogan "discovered" that some of the journalists who objected were actually members of Ergenekon, and other newspapers supported Erdogan - these later turned out to be entirely owned and run by Gulenists, who sure did get their fingers in a lot of pots for an innocent above-ground network of educational institutions. In just a few years, Erdogan decimated the ranks of the military, the courts, and the media, and replaced their former leaders with a new generation of faithful Turkish patriots - all of whom were coincidentally graduates of the same friendly legitimate school network.
Alaskan government1 mentions across 1 issues

Alaskan government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2023 and April 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Many older people would be dependent on welfare from the Alaskan government". It most often appears alongside Alaska, Andamanese, Arctic hysteria.

Reference entry
Alaskan government
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 06, 2023
Last seen
April 06, 2023
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Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias
April 06, 2023 · Original source
The typical Eskimo who Dr. Foulks examines came from a small village that still practiced the traditional ways. The older men were hunters, and wanted their children to be hunters too. But the village might have also had a church (staffed by white missionaries), a school (perhaps linked to the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and maybe a clinic or general store. Many older people would be dependent on welfare from the Alaskan government.
Albanese government1 mentions across 1 issues

Albanese government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 10, 2023 and November 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "with the Albanese government I have been surprised". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

Reference entry
Albanese government
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 10, 2023
Last seen
November 10, 2023
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Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
But with the Albanese government I have been surprised to discover that getting a politician on side to yell about your issue - while obviously still really nice to have of course - is not so necessary. They have initiated a lot of substantial legislative changes and a bunch of big reviews and most of these processes are open to public comment. So you can get a surprising amount of progress by engaging with these processes. You send in a 5 page submission saying "hey your exposure draft is great but there are these 4 problems with it and we think they could be alleviated in this way and also we think it would be great to also address this related issue that your current bill doesn't look at". And sometimes you convince them.
So these are very different situations in the same country and political system. And perhaps as the Albanese government ages more policy inertia will set in. The situation may be different again in other countries. But in all cases a level of specific knowledge is needed about the system, issue, and political pressures that certain actors face.
ALDF1 mentions across 1 issues

ALDF is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Alene ... a veteran of animal welfare campaigns at PETA, ALDF". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot initiative, @GoodSciProject.

Reference entry
ALDF
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 28, 2021
Last seen
December 28, 2021
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ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Legal Impact For Chickens, $72,000, to help kickstart their project of suing factory farms that violate animal cruelty laws or otherwise expose themselves to legal action. They write: "If we sue a company that kills 100 million chickens a year, then success would mean incrementally improving the lives of a significant number (perhaps 80 million) of these chickens". Alene, their founder, graduated from Harvard Law School and is a veteran of animal welfare campaigns at PETA, ALDF, and the Good Food Institute. My review team said this was an unusually high-impact animal welfare opportunity; if you’d like to donate too, you can do so at https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/donate .
Inline links: Legal Impact For Chickens, https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/donate
Alien Planetwatchers Association1 mentions across 1 issues

Alien Planetwatchers Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2021 and February 03, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "They present their results at the annual meeting of the Alien Planetwatchers Association (APA)". It most often appears alongside 2020, America, APA Meeting.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 03, 2021
Last seen
February 03, 2021
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Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems
February 03, 2021 · Original source
These aliens are friends with the aliens simulating the universe, so they get a bunch of copies of Earth and run a bunch of experiments, until they feel like they really understand what’s going on. They present their results at the annual meeting of the Alien Planetwatchers Association (APA), and propose some general principles:
Alignment Forum1 mentions across 1 issues

Alignment Forum is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 11, 2022 and April 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "posts on the Alignment Forum tagged 'inner alignment'". It most often appears alongside AI safety curriculum, AlphaGo, DALL-E.

Reference entry
Alignment Forum
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 11, 2022
Last seen
April 11, 2022
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Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 11, 2022 · Original source
The 60-odd posts on the Alignment Forum tagged “inner alignment”
Inline links: 60-odd posts on the Alignment Forum
Alkemist1 mentions across 1 issues

Alkemist is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 05, 2022 and October 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "When they sent the sample to Alkemist, it turns out it was only 1.8%". It most often appears alongside AIDP, Amazon, American Botanical Council.

Reference entry
Alkemist
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 05, 2022
Last seen
October 05, 2022
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How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
We have been working on a reishi extract specifically targeting the ganoderic acids for a long time, but lab testing limitations made that difficult. For a while one of our competitors was selling a reishi extract that they claimed contained 6% triterpenes, which ganoderic acids are. However, the lab they were using was a fake dry lab. When they sent the sample to Alkemist, it turns out it was only 1.8%. That's still pretty good, as most of the stuff on the market we tested has almost none. However, they charge ridiculous amounts for it! We wanted to do a much more potent one for a much better price. It took us a while to get it right, and it turns out a straight ethanol extraction was the best way to get the highest ganoderic acids. We've been able to get as much as 15% in some extractions, but we settled on 9% as the standardization, as that is what we can reliably hit every time. This batch has over 10%. We are also only taking into account the 10 ganoderic acids as part of the USP list. There are other ones in this extract that are not a part of that 9% number, so this is a VERY potent extract.
Alkemist Labs1 mentions across 1 issues

Alkemist Labs is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 27, 2025 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "there are a plethora of very well known labs doing great work, like Alkemist Labs for example". It most often appears alongside /r/NootropicsDepot, @fae_dreams, @ObhishekSaha.

Reference entry
Alkemist Labs
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 27, 2025
Last seen
February 27, 2025
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Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
Some blueprint products seem to be clearly out of spec, so Mr. Johnson probably doesn't really know what he's doing either. Not to mention that the lab they seem to be using, Certified Labs, used to be ABC testing which we know have botched a bunch of testing in the past. So bad in fact, that the FDA even intervened. It's always funny that quite a few brands with problematic products all seem to do their testing via Certified Labs/ABC testing. For example, look at where Gorilla Mind is testing their products, like Turkplex, which recently failed miserably in our testing. Bryan Johnson boasts about having all the money in the world, and that he's so super advanced blah blah blah, but he's testing with a seemingly sketchy lab even though there are a plethora of very well known labs doing great work, like Alkemist Labs for example. It really makes me wonder if these guys are knowingly selecting Certified Labs/ABC testing for a specific reason, or perhaps Certified Labs is very aggressive in marketing and if you are new in the industry, they may be the first lab you find? Odd, but could be a possibility.
Inline links: clearly out of spec, used to be ABC testing, FDA even intervened, like Turkplex
Allied Powers1 mentions across 1 issues

Allied Powers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2021 and November 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory". It most often appears alongside Alcsutdoboz, Angela Merkel, Attila.

Reference entry
Allied Powers
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 04, 2021
Last seen
November 04, 2021
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Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.
Alpha1 mentions across 1 issues

Alpha is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA, reacting to Alpha’s cyber‑charter bid"; "Alpha’s parent company was approved to launch the tuition‑free Arizona charter school"; "Alpha public relations gatekeeper; How Alpha Works; Alpha founders". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Reference entry
Alpha
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 27, 2025
Last seen
June 27, 2025
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Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
2-Hour Learning’s flagship school is the “Alpha School” in Austin Texas. The Alpha homepage makes three claims:
Inline links: Alpha homepage
Check Chart Time Workshops were the “life skills” program at the original Alpha School. Some of the workshops at the core school have included: Thanksgiving Dinner: The Kinders and 1st graders learned to make a dinner for their parents
Hope at some point they self-actualize Clearly not every kid will get to stage three (and no one will get to stage three in every endeavor), but Ericsson’s point is that EVERYONE who gets to stage three starts at stage one. And we know how to motivate kids in stage one – or at least Roland Fryer does. Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation: Incentives → Motivation Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn’t “follow the data” on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension. Alpha HAS followed the data. They have built deliberate and extensive incentive systems. But Alpha also knows what the general population thinks of incentives, so they don’t talk about it. There are lots of parents that are against throwing kids learning in front of screens and lots of educators against “too rapidly accelerating learning”, but there are even more parents and educators against bribing kids. When you see the complaints about Alpha on Reddit they criticize the AI and the screen time and the lack of teachers and the tuition and the “funded by billionaires” but no one complains about the incentive/bribery system. Because unless you go to Alpha you don’t even know about the incentive system. Alpha believes in the incentive system, and it is a very important part of their program, but they don’t brag about it. Alpha’s Incentive Programs Alpha schools have their own in-house currency. Alpha has “Alpha bucks”; GT School has “GT bucks”. My understanding is that they work a little differently on each campus, but the overall philosophy is the same. This review will focus on the details of the GT system since it is what I know best. If the students complete their 2-hour learning “minimums” each day they earn about 10 GT Bucks. They get additional bonuses for every lesson they complete beyond their minimums. They also get a bonus if they finish their minimums within the scheduled time (vs going home and doing them later), additional bonuses if the entire class completes their minimums during the allotted time, and weekly bonuses for hitting longer term targets. They only get credit if they both complete their lessons AND get 80% or higher on the problem sets within the lesson. If they get 79% they still move on (with the questions they missed coming back later for review), but they don’t get the GT bucks associated with the lesson (this stops gaming where the kids rush through the lessons just to get “bucks”) A GT buck is worth 10-cents. So if they are really pushing a kid could be earning roughly $2 per day. Fryer paid kids to read books, GT pays kids to do lessons. Once a kid has earned a collection of GT bucks they can spend those bucks at the GT-store. The Alpha store has a wide selection of offerings. The GT store, because it is a much smaller school, is more like a catalog. The kids can select what they want and the school will order it so it is ready when they earn enough “bucks”. Every kid has their own personalized incentive – do the school work and they will get their personalized prize. Different kids respond to this differently. My youngest spends his GT-bucks as he earns them – coming home most weeks with a bouncy ball or a protein bar. My middle daughter has ambitions to save for things (she really wants a lego chess set), but often gives in and buys something before she saves enough (she has built an impressive collection of stuffies). My older daughter likes to save. She really wanted a Taylor Swift sweater and saved her points for months to buy it, but then, when she had enough bucks, she decided she didn’t want to spend them – so no sweater but a record number of points in her balance statement (then my middle daughter used her points to buy the sweater… You can imagine how that went…). My kids are gifted. They love learning. They compete in academic bees and chess tournaments and musical productions for fun. But the GT incentive system has turbo-charged their academic learning well beyond that inborn desire to learn. We decided to join the GT school in July, but, for logistical reasons, we could not start until October. For the 3.5 months I signed the kids up to iXL – the tool that Alpha students use for 80% of their academic work – including almost all of their Language, Math and Science lessons. I wanted to get the kids used to using it over the summer before they started school. It did not go well. We tried getting the kids to work on it for about an hour per day, but it was a fight every time. It was the same content they would be doing at GT, but without the GT structure, and it did not work. But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”. Was it bad that they were being bribed to do lessons? 76% of Americans would think so. But it definitely worked. My middle daughter – who is the most driven by money – has completed more than two full grades of school in ~20-weeks (60% of the school year), and shows no signs of slowing down. I have not noticed any reduced interest in learning outside of school. My oldest daughter does not like the idea of incentives at all. She doesn’t need the incentives and she thinks other kids shouldn’t need to be incentivized either. But the incentives are helping with her younger siblings, and, even if they aren’t pushing her to go harder, they definitely don’t seem to be hurting her internal drive. Incentives, Incentives Everywhere In addition to the core incentive system, the schools have been testing two new ones. Part way through the school year at the GT school they created an incentive system to drive non-academic behavior. In this system, called “Dojo Points”, kids earn Dojo Points by being pleasant, respectful team-players. The guides give out the points in qualitative ways when the kids demonstrate perseverance, teamwork, respect, autonomy, and when they give and receive feedback to each other. More so than the GT bucks, my kids will come home and tell me how many Dojo Points they earned that day. A high day is somewhere around six points. The kid in each “section” (split between the older and the younger kids) who earns the most Dojo Points in a day becomes the daily “Dojo Master” and gets a “key”. At the end of the week, assuming no ties, there are five keys divided among the kids in each group. On Friday the kids are presented with a bunch of locked boxes. One of the boxes has a prize in it. The kids with keys check the boxes to see if their key opens the box with a prize. The system seems to work. My 6-year old can often be disruptive in many settings, including at school, but lately he has turned a corner at school and has been winning the daily Dojo Master (this week he has won four of the five days so far, and almost has a lock on the Friday prize). Will he start mis-behaving more as soon as he loses access to the incentive? Maybe. He definitely misbehaves at home from time-to-time and has trouble regulating when things don’t go his way. Is his regulation now better than it was before he was put on the incentive program at school? I think so? But maybe that is just a function of him getting older and he would have been getting better anyway? Another example where it would have been nice to have a twin brother we could have experimented on I guess. While GT was focused on non-academic behavior Alpha set their sites on another problem that schools face: Summer regression. Educators have long known about the summer regression problem – kids tend to atrophy or regress over the summer break (this is worse for less privileged children, but true for all kids). We have not had our summer with GT yet, but last summer the Alpha school ran an experiment where kids who completed lessons in the summer were paid real money (US dollars – not “Alpha bucks”). They were given $1 per lesson completed over the summer (effectively 10x what they make during the school year). Recall that generally during the school day kids who “hit their minimums” complete about 10 lessons per day over 2-hours. So any kid who kept that up on their own over the summer could earn $10/day for 2-hours of work ($5/hour). Not bad for a 6-year old. The Public Relations challenge As Alpha is expanding its program beyond its own school it has, understandably, focused on the “AI-powered 2-hour learning” product. It is that tool that seems to be what differentiates Alpha from all the other schools in America. The tool lets kids learn 2.6x faster. But from my experience the tool is necessary but not sufficient. The tool provides the means for kids to advance and learn quickly, but it does not provide the motivation. The rest of the school has been built around providing the gaps that the tool misses – both the need to increase student motivation, but also any other gaps that come up. If the 2-hour learning tool is the self-driving car, the incentives are the fuel, and the rest of the school is the human behind the wheel who makes sure the self-driving car isn’t caught in a loop. So what happens when Alpha takes their core product and pushes it somewhere without the infrastructure that goes around it? It still works, but just not as well. In the way that Alpha measures effectiveness (see next section) students in the Alpha school advance 2.6x faster. Kids at the GT-school advance ~5x faster (mostly due to the selection effect of the kids they bring into that program). In the homeschool program the school is piloting with the exact same software (but without the supporting infrastructure, guides and incentives) the students are advancing at ~1x speed. That doesn’t seem awesome, but remember that is with just 2-hours of academics per day, not a full day of classes. Good but not great. The Alpha team is trying to figure out how to improve the performance of the kids in the home school pilot before they expand it beyond the beta testers. I expect the answer will be related to the incentives. Part Five: Does it work? Alpha claims 2.6x average learning speed versus traditional schools, but what does “learning speed” mean? Even the Alpha guides get confused sometimes. There are two learning concepts that get entangled: How fast students are learning and mastering the content – “Lesson Clock Speed”
Alpha School1 mentions across 1 issues

Alpha School is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 30, 2025 and June 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Good comments on the Alpha School review". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Brownsville Campus, Matt Bateman.

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Open Thread 388
June 30, 2025 · Original source
1: Good comments on the Alpha School review:
Alpha School experiences from Redditors, mostly negative (1, 2, beware stereotypical Redditors who hate everything they can associate with “tech bros” but there’s some signal to be found in the noise).
Inline links: 1, 2
Alpha School experiences from ACX commenters, mostly positive (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Alphabet1 mentions across 1 issues

Alphabet is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2024 and October 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the third Alphabet". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @GroundHogStrat, A.I. salons.

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SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
You can’t see it in the screenshot, but the first stock is NVIDIA, the second TSMC, the third Alphabet, and the fourth Microsoft. On average they went up about 0.5%, on a day when the NASDAQ as a whole also went up about 0.5%.
Alphabet Inc1 mentions across 1 issues

Alphabet Inc is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2022 and May 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "California is the home of Alphabet Inc". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

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Alphabet Inc
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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it’s symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year’s gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they’re listed on the ballot. Starting with:
AlphaFold1 mentions across 1 issues

AlphaFold is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 04, 2022 and April 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "AlphaFold (ditto for proteins)". It most often appears alongside 2013, Agricultural Revolution, AI.

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Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 04, 2022 · Original source
Chess AI performance over time. Why does this matter? If there’s a slow takeoff (ie gradual exponential curve), it will become obvious that some kind of terrifying transformative AI revolution is happening, before the situation gets apocalyptic. There will be time to prepare, to test slightly-below-human AIs and see how they respond, to get governments and other stakeholders on board. We don’t have to get every single thing right ahead of time. On the other hand, because this is proceeding along the usual channels, it will be the usual variety of muddled and hard-to-control. With the exception of a few big actors like the US and Chinese government, and maybe the biggest corporations like Google, the outcome will be determined less by any one agent, and more by the usual multi-agent dynamics of political and economic competition. There will be lots of opportunities to affect things, but no real locus of control to do the affecting. If there’s a fast takeoff (ie sudden FOOM), there won’t be much warning. Conventional wisdom will still say that transformative AI is thirty years away. All the necessary pieces (ie AI alignment theory) will have to be ready ahead of time, prepared blindly without any experimental trial-and-error, to load into the AI as soon as it exists. On the plus side, a single actor (whoever has this first AI) will have complete control over the process. If this actor is smart (and presumably they’re a little smart, or they wouldn’t be the first team to invent transformative AI), they can do everything right without going through the usual government-lobbying channels. So the slower a takeoff you expect, the less you should be focusing on getting every technical detail right ahead of time, and the more you should be working on building the capacity to steer government and corporate policy to direct an incoming slew of new technologies. Yudkowsky Contra Christiano Eliezer counters that although progress may retroactively look gradual and continuous when you know what metric to graph it on, it doesn’t necessarily look that way in real life by the measures that real people care about. (one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. ) So Eliezer is much less impressed by the history of previous technologies than Paul is. He’s also skeptical of the “GDP will double in 4 years before it doubles in 1” claim, because of two contingent disagreements and two fundamental disagreements. The first contingent disagreement: government regulations make it hard to deploy imperfect things, and non-trivial to deploy things even after they’re perfect. Eliezer has non-jokingly said he thinks AI might destroy the world before the average person can buy a self-driving car. Why? Because the government has to approve self-driving cars (and can drag its feet on that), but the apocalypse can happen even without government approval. In Paul’s model, sometime long before superintelligence we should have AIs that can drive cars, and that increases GDP and contributes to a general sense that exciting things are going on. Eliezer says: fine, what if that’s true? Who cares if self-driving cars will be practical a few years before the world is destroyed? It’ll take longer than that to lobby the government to allow them on the road. The second contingent disagreement: superintelligent AIs can lie to us. Suppose you have an AI which wants to destroy humanity, whose IQ is doubling every six months. Right now it’s at IQ 200, and it suspects that it would take IQ 800 to build a human-destroying superweapon. Its best strategy is to lie low for a year. If it expects humans would turn it off if they knew how close it was to superweapons, it can pretend to be less intelligent than it really is. The period when AIs are holding back so we don’t discover their true power level looks like a period of lower-than-expected GDP growth - followed by a sudden FOOM once the AI gets its superweapon and doesn’t need to hold back. So even if Paul is conceptually right and fundamental progress proceeds along a nice smooth curve, it might not look to us like a nice smooth curve, because regulations and deceptive AIs could prevent mildly-transformative AI progress from showing up on graphs, but wouldn’t prevent the extreme kind of AI progress that leads to apocalypse. To an outside observer, it would just look like nothing much changed, nothing much changed, nothing much changed, and then suddenly, FOOM. But even aside from this, Eliezer doesn’t think Paul is conceptually right! He thinks that even on the fundamental level, AI progress is going to be discontinuous. It’s like a nuclear bomb. Either you don’t have a nuclear bomb yet, or you do have one and the world is forever transformed. There is a specific moment at which you go from “no nuke” to “nuke” without any kind of “slightly worse nuke” acting as a harbinger. He uses the example of chimps → humans. Evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years evolving brainier and brainier animals (not teleologically, of course, but in practice). For most of those hundreds of millions of years, that meant the animal could have slightly more instincts, or a better memory, or some other change that still stayed within the basic animal paradigm. At the chimp → human transition, we suddenly got tool use, language use, abstract thought, mathematics, swords, guns, nuclear bombs, spaceships, and a bunch of other stuff. The rhesus monkey → chimp transition and the chimp → human transition both involved the same ~quadrupling of neuron number, but the former was pretty boring and the latter unlocked enough new capabilities to easily conquer the world. The GPT-2 → GPT-3 transition involved centupling parameter count. Maybe we will keep centupling parameter count every few years, and most times it will be incremental improvement, and one time it will conquer the world. But even talking about centupling parameter points is giving Paul too much credit. Lots of past inventions didn’t come by quadrupling or centupling something, they came by discovering “the secret sauce”. The Wright brothers (he argues) didn’t make a plane with 4x the wingspan of the last plane that didn’t work, they invented the first plane that could fly at all. The Hiroshima bomb wasn’t some previous bomb but bigger, it was what happened after a lot of scientists spent a long time thinking about a fundamentally different paradigm of bomb-making and brought it to a point where it could work at all. The first transformative AI isn’t going to be GPT-3 with more parameters, it will be what happens after someone discovers how to make machines truly intelligent. (this is the same debate Eliezer had with Ajeya over the Biological Anchors post; have I mentioned that Ajeya and Paul are married?) Fine, Let’s Nitpick The Hell Out Of The Chimps Vs. Humans Example This is where the two of them end up, so let’s follow. Between chimps and humans, there were about seven million years of intermediate steps. These had some human capabilities, but not others. IE homo erectus probably had language, but not mathematics, and in terms of taking over the world it did make it to most of the Old World but was less dominant than moderns. But if we say evolutionary history started 500 million years ago (the Cambrian), and AI history started with the Dartmouth Conference in 1955, then the equivalent of 7 million years of evolutionary history is 1 year of AI history. In the very very unlikely and forced comparison where evolutionary history and AI history go at the same speed, there will be only about a year between chimp-level and human-level AIs. A chimp-level AI probably can’t double GDP, so this would count as a fast takeoff by Paul’s criterion. But even more than that, chimp → human feels like a discontinuity. It’s not just “animals kept getting smarter for hundreds of millions of years, and then ended up very smart indeed”. That happened for a while, and then all of sudden there was a near-instant phase transition into a totally different way of using intelligence with completely new abilities. If AI worked like this, we would have useful toys and interesting specialists for a few decades, until suddenly someone “got it right”, completed the package that was necessary for “true intelligence”, and then we would have a completely new category of thing. Paul admits this analogy is awkward for his position. He answers: Chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation. The task faced by a chimp is largely independent of the abilities that give humans such a huge fitness advantage. It’s not completely independent—the overlap is the only reason that evolution eventually produces humans—but it’s different enough that we should not be surprised if there are simple changes to chimps that would make them much better at designing technology or doing science or accumulating culture […] So I don’t think the example of evolution tells us much about whether the continuous change story applies to intelligence. This case is potentially missing the key element that drives the continuous change story—optimization for performance. Evolution changes continuously on the narrow metric it is optimizing, but can change extremely rapidly on other metrics. For human technology, features of the technology that aren’t being optimized change rapidly all the time. When humans build AI, they will be optimizing for usefulness, and so progress in usefulness is much more likely to be linear. That is, evolution wasn’t optimizing for tool use/language/intelligence, so we got an “overhang” where chimps could potentially have been very good at these, but evolution never bothered “closing the circuit” and turning those capabilities “on”. After a long time, evolution finally blundered into an area where marginal improvements in these capacities improved fitness, so evolution started improving them and it was easy. Imagine a company which, through some oversight, didn’t have a Sales department. They just sat around designing and manufacturing increasingly brilliant products, but not putting any effort into selling them. Then the CEO remembers they need a Sales department, starts one up, and the company goes from moving near zero units to moving millions of units overnight. It would look like the company had “suddenly” developed a “vast increase in capabilities”. But this is only possible when a CEO who is weirdly unconcerned about profit forgets to do obvious profit-increasing things for many years. This is Paul’s counterargument to the chimp analogy. Evolution isn’t directly concerned about various intellectual skills; it only wants them in the unusual cases where they’ll contribute to fitness on the margin. AI companies will be very concerned about various intellectual skills. If there’s a trivial change that can make their product 10x better, they’ll make it. So AI capabilities will grow in a “well-rounded” way, there won’t be any “overhangs”, and there won’t be any opportunities for a sudden overhang-solving phase transition with associated new-capability development like with chimps → humans. Eliezer answers: Chimps are nearly useless because they're not general, and doing anything on the scale of building a nuclear plant requires mastering so many different nonancestral domains that it's no wonder natural selection didn't happen to separately train any single creature across enough different domains that it had evolved to solve every kind of domain-specific problem involved in solving nuclear physics and chemistry and metallurgy and thermics in order to build the first nuclear plant in advance of any old nuclear plants existing. Humans are general enough that the same braintech selected just for chipping flint handaxes and making water-pouches and outwitting other humans, happened to be general enough that it could scale up to solving all the problems of building a nuclear plant - albeit with some added cognitive tech that didn't require new brainware, and so could happen incredibly fast relative to the generation times for evolutionarily optimized brainware. Now, since neither humans nor chimps were optimized to be "useful" (general), and humans just wandered into a sufficiently general part of the space that it cascaded up to wider generality, we should legit expect the curve of generality to look at least somewhat different if we're optimizing for that. Eg, right now people are trying to optimize for generality with AIs like Mu Zero and GPT-3. In both cases we have a weirdly shallow kind of generality. Neither is as smart or as deeply general as a chimp, but they are respectively better than chimps at a wide variety of Atari games, or a wide variety of problems that can be superposed onto generating typical human text. They are, in a sense, more general than a biological organism at a similar stage of cognitive evolution, with much less complex and architected brains, in virtue of having been trained, not just on wider datasets, but on bigger datasets using gradient-descent memorization of shallower patterns, so they can cover those wide domains while being stupider and lacking some deep aspects of architecture. It is not clear to me that we can go from observations like this, to conclude that there is a dominant mainline probability for how the future clearly ought to go and that this dominant mainline is, "Well, before you get human-level depth and generalization of general intelligence, you get something with 95% depth that covers 80% of the domains for 10% of the pragmatic impact". ...or whatever the concept is here, because this whole conversation is, on my own worldview, being conducted in a shallow way relative to the kind of analysis I did in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, where I was like, "here is the historical observation, here is what I think it tells us that puts a lower bound on this input-output curve". Here Eliezer sort of kind of grants Paul’s point that AIs will be optimized for generality in a way chimps aren’t, but points to his previous “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” essay to argue that we should expect a fast takeoff anyway. IEM has a lot of stuff in it, but one key point is that instead of using analogies to predict the course of future AI, we should open that black box and try to actually reason about how it will work, in which case we realize that recursive self-improvement common-sensically has to cause an intelligence explosion. I am sort of okay with this, but I feel like a commitment to avoiding analogies should involve not bringing up the chimp-human analogy further, which Eliezer continues to do, quite a lot. I do feel like Paul succeeded in convincing me that we shouldn’t place too much evidential weight on it. The Wimbledon Of Reference Class Tennis “Reference class tennis” is an old rationalist idiom for people throwing analogies back and forth. “AI will be slow, because it’s an economic transition like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, and those were slow!” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an evolutionary step like chimps → humans, and that was fast!” “No, AI will be slow, because it’s an invention, like the computer, and computers were invented piecemeal and required decades of innovation to be useful.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an invention, like the nuclear bomb, and nuclear bombs went from impossible to city-killing in a single day.” “No, AI will be slow, because it will be surrounded by a shell-like metallic computer case, which makes it like a turtle, and turtles are slow.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s dangerous and powerful, like a tiger, and tigers are fast!” And so on. Comparing things to other things is a time-tested way of speculating about them. But there are so many other things to compare to that you can get whatever result you want. This is the failure mode that the term “reference class tennis” was supposed to point to. Both participants in this debate are very smart and trying their hardest to avoid reference-class tennis, but neither entirely succeeds. Eliezer’s preferred classes are Bitcoin (“there wasn't a cryptocurrency developed a year before Bitcoin using 95% of the ideas which did 10% of the transaction volume”), nukes, humans/chimps, the Wright Brothers, AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines), and AlphaFold (ditto for proteins). Paul’s preferred classes are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, chess engines (which have gotten better along a gradual, well-behaved curve), all sorts of inventions like computers and ships (likewise), and world GDP. Eliezer already listed most of these in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper in 2013, and concluded that the space of possible analogies was contradictory enough that we needed to operate at a higher level. Maybe so, but when someone lobs a reference class tennis ball at you, it’s hard to resist the urge to hit it back. Recursive Self-Improvement This is where I think Eliezer most wants to take the discussion. The idea is: once AI is smarter than humans, it can do a superhuman job of developing new AI. In his Microeconomics paper, he writes about an argument he (semi-hypothetically) had with Ray Kurzweil about Moore’s Law. Kurzweil expected Moore’s Law to continue forever, even after the development of superintelligence. Eliezer objects: Suppose we were dealing with minds running a million times as fast as a human, at which rate they could do a year of internal thinking in thirty-one seconds, such that the total subjective time from the birth of Socrates to the death of Turing would pass in 20.9 hours. Do you still think the best estimate for how long it would take them to produce their next generation of computing hardware would be 1.5 orbits of the Earth around the Sun? That is: the fact that it took 1.5 years for transistor density to double isn’t a natural law. It’s pointing to a law that the amount of resources (most notably intelligence) that civilization focused on the transistor-densifying problem equalled the amount it takes to double it every 1.5 years. If some shock drastically changed available resources (by eg speeding up human minds a million times), this would change the resources involved, and the same laws would predict transistor speed doubling in some shorter amount of time (naively 0.000015 years, although realistically at that scale other inputs would dominate). So when Paul derives clean laws of economics showing that things move along slow growth curves, Eliezer asks: why do you think they would keep doing this when one of the discoveries they make along that curve might be “speeding up intelligence a million times”? (Eliezer actually thinks improvements in the quality of intelligence will dominate improvements in speed - AIs will mostly be smarter, not just faster - but speed is a useful example here and we’ll stick with it) Paul answers: Summary of my response: Before there is AI that is great at self-improvement there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement. Powerful AI can be used to develop better AI (amongst other things). This will lead to runaway growth. This on its own is not an argument for discontinuity: before we have AI that radically accelerates AI development, the slow takeoff argument suggests we will have AI that significantly accelerates AI development (and before that, slightly accelerates development). That is, an AI is just another, faster step in the hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, which corresponds to a further increase in rate but not a discontinuity (or even a discontinuity in rate). The most common argument for recursive self-improvement introducing a new discontinuity seems be: some systems “fizzle out” when they try to design a better AI, generating a few improvements before running out of steam, while others are able to autonomously generate more and more improvements. This is basically the same as the universality argument in a previous section. Eliezer: Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior. Outside of toy models: Over the last 10,000 years we had humans going from mediocre at improving their mental systems to being (barely) able to throw together AI systems, but 10,000 years is the equivalent of an eyeblink in evolutionary time - outside the metaphor, this says, "A month before there is AI that is great at self-improvement, there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement." (Or possibly an hour before, if reality is again more extreme along the Eliezer-Hanson axis than Eliezer. But it makes little difference whether it's an hour or a month, given anything like current setups.) This is just pumping hard again on the intuition that says incremental design changes yield smooth output changes, which (the meta-level of the essay informs us wordlessly) is such a strong default that we are entitled to believe it if we can do a good job of weakening the evidence and arguments against it. And the argument is: Before there are systems great at self-improvement, there will be systems mediocre at self-improvement; implicitly: "before" implies "5 years before" not "5 days before"; implicitly: this will correspond to smooth changes in output between the two regimes even though that is not how continuous feedback loops work. I got a bit confused trying to understand the criticality metaphor here. There’s no equivalent of neutron decay, so any AI that can consistently improve its intelligence is “critical” in some sense. Imagine Elon Musk replaces his brain with a Neuralink computer which - aside from having read-write access - exactly matches his current brain in capabilities. Also he becomes immortal. He secludes himself from the world, studying AI and tinkering with his brain’s algorithms. Does he become a superintelligence? I think under the assumptions Paul and Eliezer are using, eventually maybe. After some amount of time he’ll come across a breakthrough he can use to increase his intelligence. Then, armed with that extra intelligence, he’ll be able to pursue more such breakthroughs. However intelligent the AI you’re scared of is, Musk will get there eventually. How long will it take? A good guess might be “years” - Musk starts out as an ordinary human, and ordinary humans are known to take years to make breakthroughs. Suppose it takes Musk one year to come up with a first breakthrough that raises his IQ 1 point. How long will his second breakthrough take? It might take longer, because he has picked the lowest-hanging fruit, and all the other possible breakthroughs are much harder. Or it might take shorter, because he’s slightly smarter than he was before, and maybe some extra intelligence goes a really long way in AI research. The concept of an intelligence explosion seems to assume the second effect dominates the first. This would match the observation that human researchers, who aren’t getting any smarter over time, continue making new discoveries. That suggests the range of possible discoveries at a given intelligence level is pretty vast. Some research finds that the usual pattern in science is constant rate of discovery from exponentially increasing number of researchers, suggesting strong low-hanging fruit effects, but these seem to be overwhelmed by other considerations in AI right now. I think Eliezer’s position on this subject is shaped by assumptions like: If you have an AI as intelligent as Elon Musk today, then tomorrow you can run it on more hardware with a bit of normal human algorithmic progress, and get one twice as intelligent. So even if it would take Elon years to make a breakthrough, long before those years are up you’ll have an AI that can make breakthroughs much faster.
Inline links: thirty years away, Biological Anchors, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, Some research finds
AlphaWrite1 mentions across 1 issues

AlphaWrite is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Mostly on AlphaWrite". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

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AlphaWrite
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1
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1
First seen
June 27, 2025
Last seen
June 27, 2025
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Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
Writing (Mostly on AlphaWrite)
AlphaZero1 mentions across 1 issues

AlphaZero is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "DeepMind got their Go AI AlphaZero to try learning chess". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, AI Impacts.

Reference entry
AlphaZero
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 06, 2021
Last seen
August 06, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
But can the learning algorithm learn to play chess? Yes, extremely well. DeepMind got their Go AI AlphaZero to try learning chess, and it became world champion within a day. Then they asked it to learn a different game called shogi, and it became world champion of that one too. Could AlphaZero learn how to invent new rockets? No, because that’s not the class of problems it knows how to learn about (it’s not a board game where it can play against itself a bunch of times and observe its mistakes). So is the learning algorithm a narrow AI or a general AI? It’s not infinitely narrow - it can learn any board game you throw at it - but it’s not infinitely general either. Certainly it’s more general, smarter, and at least slightly scarier than a polynomial that predicts parole decisions.
Right now a lot of research is going into making things that are slightly more general than AlphaZero. For example, could you get something which, in addition to being able to play any board game, can also play any video game? This turns out to be a really different problem; my understanding is that they’re pretty close but not quite there. What about just games in general? Last week, DeepMind published a paper, Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents. They created a simulated 3D physical environment, stuck an AI in a simulated body in that environment, and made it go through various obstacle courses and stuff. They found that the knowledge generalized, so that the AI was eventually able to learn to play games they hadn’t taught it, like hide-and-seek and capture-the-flag, coming up with decent strategies on their first attempt based on the general principles it had learned from other things. Where does this place it on the “it’s just an algorithm” vs. “real intelligence” dichotomy?
Inline links: Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents
Althing1 mentions across 1 issues

Althing is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2023 and June 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court"; "the decentralized anarcho-capitalist court of the Althing worked only inconsistently". It most often appears alongside Aeschylus, Aevar, Althing.

Reference entry
Althing
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 16, 2023
Last seen
June 16, 2023
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Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga
June 16, 2023 · Original source
Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes - suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past twelve months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi2). Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side - usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them “outlaws” - in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer. And Njal was the greatest lawyer of all.
Inline links: 2
Months pass. You and your kin go to the Althing. Eirik and his kin are there too, and announce that they are suing you.
You go around to all the leading men at the Althing, asking them to “support” you. The exact implications of “support” are vague, but it seems to involve standing around menacingly holding their axes while the trial is happening, in case the other side tries anything funny.
Altman Skulduggery, Inc.1 mentions across 1 issues

Altman Skulduggery, Inc. is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 13, 2025 and March 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a new shell company ... let’s call it Altman Skulduggery, Inc". It most often appears alongside ACLU, AI Lab Watch, Altman.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 13, 2025
Last seen
March 13, 2025
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OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
First, he’ll start a new shell company. Realistically this will also be named OpenAI, but to avoid confusion, let’s call it Altman Skulduggery, Inc. ASI will offer to buy OpenAI LLC from the nonprofit for its fair value (some sources say he plans to bid $40 billion). The board (made of hand-picked Altman loyalists) will agree. ASI (a normal forprofit) will get all of OpenAI’s useful corporate assets, and the nonprofit will get $40 billion, which it can spend on benefitting humanity if it wants.
Altmetric1 mentions across 1 issues

Altmetric is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 07, 2021 and April 07, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Our paper became very popular and is still in the 5% most popular scientific papers on Altmetric". It most often appears alongside academic science, Ahtiainen et al., American College of Sports Medicine.

Reference entry
Altmetric
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 07, 2021
Last seen
April 07, 2021
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Source context
Metis And Bodybuilders
April 07, 2021 · Original source
Our paper became very popular and is still in the 5% most popular scientific papers on Altmetric. But public opinion now swung in a direction we didn’t intend to: people concluded it doesn’t matter at all how long you rest.
Inline links: Our paper became very popular and is still in the 5% most popular scientific papers on Altmetric
AltSchool1 mentions across 1 issues

AltSchool is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Reference entry
AltSchool
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 27, 2025
Last seen
June 27, 2025
Outbound links
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Source context
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
“Powered by AI (not teachers).” If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you should be skeptical. Either Alpha is (a) another program for the affluent propped up by selection effects, or (b) a clever way to turn children into joyless speed‑reading calculators. Those were, more or less, the two critical camps that emerged when Alpha’s parent company was approved to launch the tuition‑free Arizona charter school this past January. Unfortunately, the public evidence base on whether this is “real” is thin in both directions. Alpha’s own material is glossy and elliptical; mainstream coverage either repeats Alpha’s talking points, or attacks the premise that kids should even be allowed to learn faster than their peers. Until Raj Chetty installs himself in the hallway with a clipboard counting MAP percentiles it is hard to get real information on what exactly Alpha is doing, whether it is actually working beyond selection effects, and if there is anyway it could scale in a way that all the other education initiatives seemed to fail to do. I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized‑controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was). Since last autumn I’ve collected the sort of on‑the‑ground detail that doesn’t surface in press releases, or is available anywhere online: long chats with founders, curriculum leads, “guides” (not teachers), Brazilian Zoom coaches, sceptical parents, ecstatic parents, and the kids who live inside the Alpha dashboard – including my own. I hope this seven-part review can help share what the program actually is and that this review is more open minded than the critics, but is something that would never get past an Alpha public relations gatekeeper: Starting Point: My Assumptions: how my views on elite private schools, tutoring and acceleration shaped the experiment (and this essay). WHAT is the existing education environment.
ALUC1 mentions across 1 issues

ALUC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 11, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "they told the ALUC"; ""the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you""". It most often appears alongside 101, Antioch, Aramco.

Reference entry
ALUC
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 11, 2023
Last seen
September 11, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
South San Francisco has recently been trying to build some apartments just at the northwest tip of the area affected. They had thought they were going to be able to reach an agreement where they told the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you". But the ALUC so far seems to be saying they don't want to grant an exemption.
It's not exactly clear yet what's going to happen with this, because it's bringing state law (which has been changed to push for more housing) into conflict with a quasi-federal authority. If the ALUC really stands firm, I suspect they'll win in federal court, but maybe they'll change their mind. (I've talked with my Congressman about this, I'm hoping there may be some action from Congress to get airport commissions generally to lighten up on blocking housing; it's kind of a wonky issue where you might be able to get bipartisan interest. Call it "deregulation / preventing frivolous lawsuits" for the Republicans, and "dealing with the housing / homelessness crisis" for Democrats.)
If I lived about 2-3 blocks further northeast, I would've been personally affected by this issue. I'm _just_ outside the 75 dB noise contour, and it's unclear whether the state ADU-streamlining laws would apply there. (I have just broken ground on an ADU, the design of which is taking advantage of some brand new rules letting you build at a slightly smaller setback if you're within half a mile of transit.) Our city planning department is kind of unsure what they should do with ADU applications under the contour. My impression is that they are inclined to just go ahead and approve stuff, because they're more afraid of Rob Bonta and YIMBY Law than they are of the ALUC. They'd just see if the ALUC notices / complains, but so far it hasn't come up.
AMA1 mentions across 1 issues

AMA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2023 and August 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "my impression is that the APA, AMA, and various other guideline-setting organizations agree with me". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, ACX, Aella.

Reference entry
AMA
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 30, 2023
Last seen
August 30, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
…but fine, these people seem to be taking this pretty seriously, and deserve a longer and more serious response. First and least relevantly, I disagree with them on the object-level question. I assume their concerns are about puberty blockers - drugs which are given to transgender minors to prevent them from going through their birth-sex puberty (ie natal men getting deeper voices and chest hair, natal women menstruating, etc). I’m not a child/adolescent psychiatrist and I don’t prescribe hormones, so I’m not an expert in this topic and this should be considered my amateur opinion only (although my impression is that the APA, AMA, and various other guideline-setting organizations agree with me). But I think these are overall good, for a few reasons: The effects of birth-sex puberty are irreversible and will make it much harder to transition in the future. The effects of puberty-blockers are mostly reversible, and preserve the option to either transition or return to birth-sex in the future. Like all drugs there are potential side effects, some of which are irreversible, but in the case of puberty blockers these seem mild and comparable to other psychiatric interventions. I think the precautionary principle supports having confused children who don’t know what they want do the reversible rather than the irreversible thing.
Amalgamated Bank1 mentions across 1 issues

Amalgamated Bank is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2022 and December 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "They happen to have made $300 million as the CEO of Amalgamated Bank". It most often appears alongside Andover, anti-Semitism, Atlantic.

Reference entry
Amalgamated Bank
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 01, 2022
Last seen
December 01, 2022
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Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
A meritocrat in good standing must be (for example) a quirky, free-spirited person who happens to have a passion for banking. And in the course of pursuing this passion, they happen to have made $300 million as the CEO of Amalgamated Bank. They didn’t become CEO in order to make the $300 million. They became CEO because they were passionate about transforming banking and expanding its reach to underrepresented minorities.
Amalgamated Kenyan Wells1 mentions across 1 issues

Amalgamated Kenyan Wells is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 11, 2024 and January 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Let’s say they hire Amalgamated Kenyan Wells"; "donating 10% of the money directly to Amalgamated Kenyan Wells". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Africa, Bob Frank.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 11, 2024
Last seen
January 11, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
But if I understand Michael’s response, he’s saying - the charity has to build the wells somehow, and that involves spending money on capitalist companies. Let’s say they hire Amalgamated Kenyan Wells. Then the money ends up in Amalgamated Kenyan Wells, presumably a profitable and successful company in the Third World, and this is no worse than donating to the company directly. So if your alternative was to give the money to a profitable and successful company in the Third World, the donation is better, because you do this and you get some free wells out of it!
Inline links: Michael’s response
Now I’m really not sure how to think about this. I think the answer is something like - the company has a certain profit margin (let’s say 10%), so you’re donating 10% of the money directly to Amalgamated Kenyan Wells, and the rest is going into the ground to become wells. So I agree that there’s some aspect of supporting capitalism here - maybe even one that’s better than giving to the company directly because it forces the company to demonstrate usefulness - but I think you could still argue that investing directly in the company has more effect.
Amazon marketplace1 mentions across 1 issues

Amazon marketplace is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I am seeking funding of 4000$ to finish self-publishing two e-books on the Amazon marketplace". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

Reference entry
Amazon marketplace
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 03, 2022
Last seen
February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#42: Publish Books On Architecture I am an architect based in India trying to build a research-based design practice. I am seeking funding of 4000$ to finish self-publishing two e-books on the Amazon marketplace that will form part of my PhD application in December 2022. The costs will cover printing of test dummies, sending a few copies to prospective guides, mentors and pay for miscellaneous fees. A validated writing practice is a desired application requirement that I am trying to full fill with the exercise. The theme of the work is to show how patronage has changed knowledge production of architecture across the four generations that have practiced, are practicing in the country. An attempt to fund the project is to prove the hypothesis that the creative economy is the only way ahead for architectural practices if necessary policy guidelines are not implemented for a sustainable future for the profession. If funded process of getting an admission and transition the research done to further work on architectural imagination may also be easier. I have complied a reading list of almost an entirety of Indian architectural design books from 1985 - 2019, around 100/125, that enables the project. These will be uploaded on my Instagram account starting here. Contents and introduction to the first book is accessed here https://isaacmathew.substack.com/p/daily-sentences-2111072039. Isaac Mathew 2201240945 . Contact me at isaac@spatialresearch.net
Inline links: here
amazon studios1 mentions across 1 issues

amazon studios is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Matthew Ball, former head of strategy for amazon studios". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
amazon studios
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Finally, Matthew Ball, former head of strategy for amazon studios, wrote a series of essays back in 2019 on Marvel, epics, mythology, and box office. The basic ideas in section I.a. can be traced back to Ball’s insight expressed in these essays.
Inline links: series of essays
American Academy of Arts and Sciences1 mentions across 1 issues

American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 12, 2023 and April 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "came together in a demand for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to create some official ethics report". It most often appears alongside AAAS, AIDS, Atul Gawande.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 12, 2023
Last seen
April 12, 2023
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Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill
April 12, 2023 · Original source
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beecher’s activism, Shannon’s CRCs, and the mounting level of Tuskegee-style scandals came together in a demand for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to create some official ethics report. Most ethicists demurred to dirty their hands with something as worldly as medicine; after some searching, they finally tapped Hans Jonas, a philosopher of Gnosticism. In retrospect, of course bioethics derives from a religion that believes the material world is evil and death is the only escape. I’m barely even joking here:
American Army Staff College1 mentions across 1 issues

American Army Staff College is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Huang graduated from the American Army Staff College in 1947". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
August 19, 2022
Last seen
August 19, 2022
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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
Huang first went to university to study electrical engineering, but during the World War II years he became an Army officer. He saw combat, recovered from a gunshot wound to the leg, and rose to the level of Major in an elite Chinese military unit known as the New First Army, which was aligned with U.S. forces. They battled Japanese troops in south-east Asia and, later, Chinese Communists during the Chinese Civil War. Huang graduated from the American Army Staff College in 1947, but after the victory of the Chinese Communists on the mainland, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan, Huang stayed in the U.S. and took up the study of Chinese history, obtaining a doctorate degree in 1964 (when he was 46). 1587 is his best-known and most widely acclaimed book, but he enjoyed a long and successful academic career and also contributed to Joseph Needham's opus Science and Civilisation in China.
American Association of Medical Colleges1 mentions across 1 issues

American Association of Medical Colleges is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "according to the American Association of Medical Colleges". It most often appears alongside Britt, China, Collins.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
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Open Letter To The NIH
August 29, 2025 · Original source
In May, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a room full of people 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 according to the American Association of Medical Colleges, “the true shortfall far exceeds $5 billion.”
Inline links: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a room full of people, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges
The NIH has spent at least $5 billion less of that money than Congress has appropriated to them, which is bad because medical research is good and we want more of it.
Inline links: $5 billion less of that money
American Botanical Council1 mentions across 1 issues

American Botanical Council is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 05, 2022 and October 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The pro-supplement American Botanical Council struck back, publishing a long report arguing that DNA barcoding was inappropriate here"; "The American Botanical Council certainly expected that, and its report was pretty scathing". It most often appears alongside AIDP, Alkemist, Amazon.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 05, 2022
Last seen
October 05, 2022
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How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
The pro-supplement American Botanical Council struck back, publishing a long report arguing that DNA barcoding was inappropriate here. Many herbal supplements are plant extracts, meaning that the plant has one or two medically useful chemicals, and supplement manufacturers purify those chemicals without including a bunch of random leaves and stems and things. Sometimes these purified extracts don’t include plant DNA; other times the purification process involves heating and chemical reactions that degrade the DNA beyond the point of detectability. Meanwhile, since supplements may include only a few mg of the active ingredient, it’s a common practice to spread it through the capsule with a “filler”, with powdered rice being among the most common. So when DNA barcoders find that eg a ginseng supplement has no ginseng DNA, but lots of rice DNA, this doesn’t mean anything sinister is going on.
Inline links: American Botanical Council
Wouldn’t you expect scientific experts and attorney generals to know this sort of thing already? The American Botanical Council certainly expected that, and its report was pretty scathing:
American Butchers Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Butchers Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2025 and July 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Mass emailed the entire American Butchers Association". It most often appears alongside Afrobarometer, AGI, AI 2027.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2025
Last seen
July 01, 2025
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Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
Mass emailed the entire American Butchers Association telling them to change their profession, became a god, not sure what to do next. 9: Meta has spent $50 - 70 billion on the metaverse over the past five years. For context, that’s about the GDP of Cambodia, or 1/5 the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo Program. Forbes has an update on the state of the technology as of this February: “Looking at . . . the current state of Meta’s VR universe, it is absolutely impossible to imagine a world where this kind of thing is ever going to succeed.”
Inline links: has spent $50 - 70 billion, has an update
American Chamber of Commerce1 mentions across 1 issues

American Chamber of Commerce is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 04, 2021
Last seen
May 04, 2021
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Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
How directly influential this appeal to engage in class war was, is hard to tell. But we do know that the American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later. Jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers (which moved to Washington in 1972) it amassed an immense campaign chest to lobby Congress and engage in research. The Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs ‘committed to the aggressive pursuit of political power for the corporation’, was founded in 1972 and thereafter became the centrepiece of collective pro-business action. The corporations involved accounted for ‘about one half of the GNP of the United States’ during the 1970s, and they spent close to $900 million annually (a huge amount at that time) on political matters. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, and the American Enterprise Institute, were formed with corporate backing both to polemicize and, when necessary, as in the case of the National Bureau of Economic Research, to construct serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies. Nearly half the financing for the highly respected NBER came from the leading companies in the Fortune 500 list. Closely integrated with the academic community, the NBER was to have a very significant impact on thinking in the economics departments and business schools of the major research universities. With abundant finance furnished by wealthy individuals (such as the brewer Joseph Coors, who later became a member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’) and their foundations (for example Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Pew Charitable Trust), a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values. A TV version of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose was funded with a grant from Scaife in 1977. ‘Business was’, Blyth concludes, ‘learning to spend as a class.’
American Civics Exchange1 mentions across 1 issues

American Civics Exchange is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 31, 2023 and January 31, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The American Civics Exchange sells contracts on political futures". It most often appears alongside 2022 contest, CFTC, Commodity Exchange Act.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
January 31, 2023
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January 31, 2023
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  • 2023 January 31, 2023
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2023
January 31, 2023 · Original source
1: The American Civics Exchange sells contracts on political futures. Does that make it a prediction market? Not exactly:
Inline links: American Civics Exchange
American College of Clinical Pharmacy1 mentions across 1 issues

American College of Clinical Pharmacy is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "a variety of funding sources including American College of Clinical Pharmacy". It most often appears alongside ASPEN, BCH, Boston Children’s Hospital.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 06, 2021
Last seen
August 06, 2021
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Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
August 06, 2021 · Original source
...ore the naysayers and needed to expand our research to other animal models. We wrote almost 20 different grant proposals to a variety of funding sources including ASPEN, American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and the Gerber Foundation. The response was always the same…. “Everyone knows it's not the lipids.” Even Fresenius, who held the rights to Omegaven, was not interested...
American College of Sports Medicine1 mentions across 1 issues

American College of Sports Medicine is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 07, 2021 and April 07, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "American College of Sports Medicine recommended 1-2-minute rest periods with some exceptions up to 3 minutes". It most often appears alongside academic science, Ahtiainen et al., Altmetric.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 07, 2021
Last seen
April 07, 2021
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Metis And Bodybuilders
April 07, 2021 · Original source
Yet the idea that short rest periods were best for bodybuilding lived on. Several review papers even recommended rest periods of 30-60 seconds and the American College of Sports Medicine recommended 1-2-minute rest periods with some exceptions up to 3 minutes. So in 2014 I wrote a review paper together with Brad Schoenfeld critiquing the theory of short rest periods for muscle growth and metabolic stress. In addition to a formal overview of the literature showing no empirical evidence that short rest periods maximize muscle growth, my critique was, in short, as follows. The benefits of short rest periods were theorized to result primarily from increased anabolic hormone production. However, production of the key anabolic hormone testosterone is overall unaffected by rest interval length. It is only growth hormone production that increased and only with rest intervals below 1 minute. Problematically, resting less than 2 minutes also increases cortisol production and thereby worsens the T:C ratio. Since there is good evidence the T:C ratio is related to muscle growth, whereas growth hormone is not anabolic in muscle tissue but mostly related to anaerobic fuel mobilization, the hormonal milieu resulting from short rest intervals is more likely to be detrimental than advantageous for muscle growth.
Inline links: in 2014 I wrote a review paper together with Brad Schoenfeld
American companies1 mentions across 1 issues

American companies is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2024 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "super common even in 2024 to find companies that don't report ESG policies and DEI goals". It most often appears alongside affirmative action, Africa, African National Congress.

Reference entry
American companies
Mention count
1
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1
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May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
On yet another hand, just by following companies and their communication with investors, Europeans seem to worry about this thing way more than Americans. It's super common even in 2024 to find companies that don't report ESG policies and DEI goals. But every single European company does have this "common prosperity". I'd like to understand better how this compares with the European experiment. (I guess there it's even less than 13%, idk)
American Economic Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Economic Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2023 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "reporting from the American Economic Association meeting". It most often appears alongside @moritheil, ACX Prediction Contest, Adam Tooze.

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1
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1
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February 09, 2023
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February 09, 2023
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Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
28: Ryan Bourne reporting from the American Economic Association meeting:
Inline links: reporting from
American evangelicals1 mentions across 1 issues

American evangelicals is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2025 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "American evangelicals have proposed everyone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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American evangelicals
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1
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1
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October 22, 2025
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October 22, 2025
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Thank you for attending. The Book of Revelation was written around 95 AD by St. John of Patmos. Most secular scholars interpret it as an allegorical description of events in John’s own time, especially the Roman persecution of the early church. But millennia of Christian commentators have treated it as a prophecy about some future cataclysm - most often during the commentator’s own era. In the 10th century, a renegade bishop declared Pope John XV to be the Antichrist. In the 19th century, the Russian Old Believers accused Napoleon of the same. In our own day, American evangelicals have proposed everyone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama.
American Federation of Teachers‑PA1 mentions across 1 issues

American Federation of Teachers‑PA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "“Just as we don’t accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers.” — Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

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1
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1
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June 27, 2025
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June 27, 2025
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Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
— Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA, reacting to Alpha’s cyber‑charter bid, January 2025
American Gaming Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Gaming Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 14, 2021 and May 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hence the American Gaming Association’s (AGA) insistence". It most often appears alongside Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Amazon, Astralcodexten Com.

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1
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1
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May 14, 2021
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May 14, 2021
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Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
...cause they knowingly sold a harmful product. No one wants to be the next Big Tobacco. Everyone is trying to avoid being seen as a purveyor of harmful products. Hence the American Gaming Association’s (AGA) insistence that “the problem is not in the products they abuse, but within the individuals.” The AGA funds a lot of research into causes of addiction. In an idea...
...tatters because they knowingly sold a harmful product. No one wants to be the next Big Tobacco. Everyone is trying to avoid being seen as a purveyor of harmful products. Hence the American Gaming Association’s (AGA) insistence that “the problem is not in the products they abuse, but within the individuals.” The AGA funds a lot of research into causes of addiction. In an ideal world, they hope...
American government1 mentions across 1 issues

American government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2024 and July 26, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "promised sweeping changes to every level of American government". It most often appears alongside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 2020 election, 2024 book review contest.

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American government
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1
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1
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July 26, 2024
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July 26, 2024
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Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.
Inline links: review, “comic book time.”, in 1974, listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”, in a Nineties grunge band, 8, take place by July 4, 2021, house-sitting the White House, “swift.”, civil war, snake venom in the water supply, Law of 22 Prairial
American Hospital Capacity Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Hospital Capacity Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 27, 2021 and December 27, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the 1-20-22 report by the American Hospital Capacity Association". It most often appears alongside ACX Grant, Astral Codex Ten, Balaji Srinivasan.

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1
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1
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December 27, 2021
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December 27, 2021
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Mantic Monday: Dogs In Wizard Hats
December 27, 2021 · Original source
The perceptive among you might notice that “…and things like that” isn’t usually the sort of thing you see in a forecasting question. Typical questions are obsessively well-specified - not just “Hospitals will be at over 80% capacity”, but “Hospitals will be at over 80% capacity according to the 1-20-22 report by the American Hospital Capacity Association, or if no report comes out on that date, the most appropriate alternative source chosen by our Resolution Committee”.
Their idea is: anyone can write a question on their market. Whoever writes it also judges it. So if I write the question on whether Omicron will cause a hospital overcrowding crisis, I get to decide whether whatever’s going on next month counts as a “crisis” or not. The intended audience is people who know and trust me - in my case, it might be blog readers like you. So you’d be trying to predict whether I will think that our future coronavirus situation looks like a “crisis”. This is obviously somewhat but not perfectly correlated with whether you think it’s a crisis and whether by some objective standard it really is a crisis, but it’s not clear that it’s any worse of a measure than what number the American Hospital Capacity Association puts on a report. Caveat emptor, I guess.
One of the giant bottlenecks for existing prediction markets has been getting people to write questions for them. This is hard for two reasons: first, it’s thankless work, and second, you have to do a lot of nitpicking of resolution criteria - figuring out whether the American Hospital Capacity Association is really trustworthy, how often it puts out reports, etc. This eliminates both reasons - you can resolve questions however you want, and you’re financially incentivized to create and promote them. If this works, expect “COME BET ON MY PREDICTION MARKET QUESTION!” to join penis enlargement pills and crypto Ponzi schemes as a classic form of spam.
American Institute for Economic Research1 mentions across 1 issues

American Institute for Economic Research is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "visiting positions at ... the American Institute for Economic Research (1999-2000)". It most often appears alongside 2017 PTAPP survey, AEI, agglomeration effect.

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1
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1
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December 09, 2021
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December 09, 2021
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Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
Tideman was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University from 1969-1973, during which time from 1970-1971 he was a Senior Staff Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Since 1973 he has been at Virginia Tech, with various visiting positions at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (1979-1980), University of Buckingham (1985-1986), and the American Institute for Economic Research (1999-2000).
Inline links: Harvard University, Council of Economic Advisors, Kennedy School of Government, University of Buckingham, American Institute for Economic Research
American intelligence agencies1 mentions across 1 issues

American intelligence agencies is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "leak from the American intelligence agencies". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

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1
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1
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September 13, 2024
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September 13, 2024
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Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.
American intelligence officials1 mentions across 1 issues

American intelligence officials is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 29, 2022 and December 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "interviewed twice by American intelligence officials". It most often appears alongside Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, Adobe Illustrator, Ahmed Chalabi.

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1
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1
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December 29, 2022
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December 29, 2022
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Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
Government experts said yesterday that he had also been interviewed twice by American intelligence officials, who were trying to verify his claims. One of the officials said he thought Mr. Saeed had been taken to a secure location. The experts said his information seemed reliable and significant.
American IRS1 mentions across 1 issues

American IRS is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 03, 2023 and April 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a few exceptions like the American IRS notwithstanding". It most often appears alongside 2008 Act, ACX, Adderall.

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American IRS
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1
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1
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April 03, 2023
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April 03, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Telemedicine Regulations
April 03, 2023 · Original source
If for some reason that doesn’t work, go to a different psychiatrist and try again. You don’t have to tell them you already tried. Since everything about ADHD diagnosis and treatment is already security theater, it’s hard to say what pill mills are doing except kind of smirking under their breath while going through the rituals - as opposed to real doctors, who go through the rituals with sincere faith. Don’t get me wrong, I do think there’s a difference here. But the regulatory state isn’t set up to say “And you have to sincerely believe in the rituals or they don’t count”. So instead they punish unrelated groups, like telepsychiatrists. See also my old post Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient. The security theater doesn’t work because it’s effective. It works because it’s inconvenient enough to weed out the less motivated fakers, and some of the remaining fakers get cold feet about lying to a nice sincere psychiatrist who seems to be trying to help them. Pill mills remove the inconvenience, and seem to be nod-and-wink cooperating with liars, so the theater stops working. The only solution is to inject some inconvenience and shame back into the process somewhere, which the DEA has chosen to do by restricting telepsychiatry. They could accomplish the same goal by making you attend your appointments naked, but I guess clothing companies have better lobbyists than telepsychiatrists do. 4: Comments About Forcing Blind People To Fill Out Forms Before They Can Access Braille I analogized forcing patients to see an in-person doctor before they could access a teledoctor to forcing blind people to fill out forms before they could access Braille. Several blind people and their friends pitched in to say this was a real problem. For example, Mikolysz: Blind person here, this kind of thing is actually much more common than people imagine. Many government agencies (regardless of which particular government you mean) just assume that anybody who needs to fill a form can read and write print and/or lives with somebody who does. This is often a problem even when the form in question is specifically targeted at blind people. Non-governmental organizations, including those who specifically serve the blind, aren't much better at this either. This issue is slightly more pronounced in civil law countries, where what constitutes a legally-binding signature is clearly defined in law and you can't just Docusign your way out of the problem, but it exists everywhere, including the US. I literally had to file this kind of document today, while the main form could be filled electronically, I was required to attach a few extra documents, for GDPR and such, and those had to be printed, filled in by a sighted person, signed and scanned. The same problem exists with physical mail which you're required to read and respond to, but which is almost never available in an accessible form, a few exceptions like the American IRS notwithstanding. 5: Comments About My Caricature Of A Doctor Who Refuses To Prescribe Psych Drugs Because People Just Need Jesus Jon Cutchins writes: You don't want psychiatrists and liberals in general to be accused of an unreasoning hatred towards Christianity you should probably be more judicious in your use of anti-Christian tropes when describing everyone who is skeptical of mind-altering drugs. Mike writes: I’ve been a primary care nurse practitioner in the Bible Belt for 20yrs and not once have I even heard of a provider telling a patient they should substitute religion for psychiatric (or any) medication. It’s so easy for some people to throw around these tropes as if Christianity is some exotic, weird tribe with horrifying anthropological traits. On the other hand, fluxe writes: I am a young Christian--in my life, I have -been told by my PCP not to get an IUD because it carries "a significant risk of causing infertility or death" -had a pharmacist refuse to fill an old, male family friend's ulcer medication because it's also an abortifacient -been told by a therapist to discontinue the SSRI a different provider had prescribed and just trust in the man of the house the PCP wasn't even particularly Christian herself, but since all of her patients are she hadn't updated on IUDs since the scare back in the 70s. Our horrifying anthropological traits become everyone's problem--it might be worth listening to those who "throw around these tropes" so you can understand what they have to deal with Unfortunately I only mention this possibility because it’s happened to several of my patients. The best I can offer in terms of being unbiased and apolitical is to signal-boost posts like this one about overly woke therapists being another big problem. Alien on Earth writes: I generally like your writing and ideas, hell, I just re-uped for a year. However, in an otherwise near perfect post, you took a cheap shot at a steriotyped view of one religion thst is not popular amoungst coastal elites, that really detracts from your core point. "The worst-case is that you get one of those doctors who think that Psych Drugs Aren’t Real Because You Just Need Jesus, and then the patient has to keep looking until they find someone else." In my experience, it is the new age(y), non-religious, doctors who are least likely to like prescribing psyc. meds or who tend to give them at too low a dose or for too short a time. Certainly, I've found little correlation with their religion, if I even know it. The only correlation I've observed is that this perscription reluctance is, perhaps, slightly more common amongst middle career doctors. Perhaps it is more common in deep red areas, I don't know. However, even there, I would suggest, it is less due to religion, per se, than to "old fashion" "grit your teeth and bear it" thinking. I agree that there are many reasons people recommend against psychiatric drugs (a few are even good). Psychiatric drugs have lots of side effects and are clearly imperfect options, and I see people object to them more often when they think they have a perfect option as an alternative. Sometimes that option is Jesus. Other times it’s the trendy new somatic yoga reprocessing kundalini trauma dianetics therapy. Other times it’s LSD or ketamine or Dr. Bob’s 24-In-One Internet Nootropic. All of these work for some people, but not as much as the people pushing them think - which I guess is also true for psych drugs. I’m nervous about people who think they’ve found the answer and pressure people towards one alternative or another without presenting evidence. I’ve seen this happen enough in religious contexts that I think it was a fair thing to use as an example. 6: Comments About Which Part Of The Government Is Responsible For This Regulation ProfessorE writes: I’m not sure that what Scott wrote is even completely accurate. I have a relative who is an MD in this space, and it seems that the underlying problem is not the DEA but an actual law passed by Congress. Aren’t telemedicine regulations limited with respect to controlled substances by the Ryan Haight Act of 2008 U.S.C. § 829(e)… there may be interpretations of this act by the DEA and other agencies, but, where controlled substances are prescribed by means of the Internet, the general requirement is that the prescribing Practitioner must have conducted at least one in-person medical evaluation of the patient. It seems like a colossal overreach to ask an Executive Branch agency to overrule the plain text of the act. There are some exceptions, which Scott noted. A different way of looking at things was that the Executive Branch was highly responsive to the emergency situation of Covid. Now that it’s not an emergency, they are obligated to return to the legal framework that exists. Congress needs to change the law, not the DEA. The *data* from covid should be used as part of a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it is reasonable to regulate telemedicine, and, if so, what regulations might address whatever problems arose. Followed by: Actually, Scott is even more off-base than I thought in my initial post. Apparently the DEA & DOJ are already proposing new changes to the 2008 Act (which seem like they violate the clear text of the act), but the act and the changes are summarized here: https://www.legitscript.com/2023/03/27/proposed-changes-ryan-haight/ Sounds like government is aware of the issue. See https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/01/2023-04248/telemedicine-prescribing-of-controlled-substances-when-the-practitioner-and-the-patient-have-not-had For the actual changes that are being proposed. End of the day, this should be modified by Congress, not the agencies. Everyone should remember that the law was written in 2008. That’s 1 year after the very first iPhone and 2 years before the first iPad. Zoom didn’t exist (2011). None of the other technologies for video conferencing existed. Congress was attempting to fight opioid pill-mills. At the time of passage, I am willing to bet that ≈0% of patients were “Telehealth” using videoconferencing. More like phone calls and email a few times to get drugs. The law should have been amended, and it hasn’t been, but it is far from clear that it was a crazy law in the first place. I mostly accept this correction, although I’m still a bit confused - a lot of the analyses by lawyers I read said things like “Unquestionably, the DEA’s proposal is not what most industry stakeholders were anticipating. The initial reaction is the rules are more restrictive than necessary and impose concerning limitations and burdens on clinicians and the patients they treat”, and I’m confused why industry stakeholders weren’t anticipating it if the DEA had to do it in order to follow the law. And JR writes: Meanwhile, the DEA was instructed by law in -2008- to develop a special registration process for telemedicine to allow providers to prescribe controlled substances remotely. The DEA has simply failed to do so in that time, despite repeated Congressional demands to act. Don't worry, though - the DEA has said about this proposed rule that it feels this will be 'less burdensome' for providers than any kind of special registration, so it feels it has discharged its legal responsibility to create a special registration process. I am a psychiatrist having to deal with this idiocy with my patients too, and renting an office temporarily is not going to cut it. So I am going the letter route. I will probably a lose a reasonable chunk of patients I was prescribing controlled substances to. The only possible saving grace is that PCPs in this country are used to being asked to sign and complete all kinds of nonsense forms and documents so probably most of them will just do it with minimal fuss. I'm more concerned with the new requirement that all telemedicine scripts now have to be recorded by the prescriber with the date and time they were written, the PHYSICAL ADDRESS of the prescriber and patient at the time of the telehealth encounter, and have an explicit note on them that they are telemedicine prescriptions. I am less concerned about PCPs balking at writing an idiotic referral than I am skittish pharmacists refusing to fill scripts that they might interpret as being labeled equivalently to FAKE SCRIPT FOR DRUGSEEKERS Based on that comment and this, my best guess about what’s happening is: Congress passed restrictions on telemedicine in 2001, and asked the DEA to come up with a way that trusted providers could avoid those restrictions. Now that there is videoconferencing, etc, most people now believe those restrictions were too severe.
Inline links: Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient, Mikolysz, writes, writes, writes, to signal-boost posts like this one about overly woke therapists being another big problem, writes, writes, Followed by, https://www.legitscript.com/2023/03/27/proposed-changes-ryan-haight/, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/01/2023-04248/telemedicine-prescribing-of-controlled-substances-when-the-practitioner-and-the-patient-have-not-had, said things like, JR writes:, this
American libraries1 mentions across 1 issues

American libraries is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "10 million books in major American libraries will not survive this century was written in 1988". It most often appears alongside 1893, 1970s, 1980s.

Reference entry
American libraries
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 30, 2021
Last seen
April 30, 2021
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Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
That’s not how the librarians saw it, though. Baker chronicles how the rhetoric about brittle paper progressed during the 1970s and 1980s and became increasingly extreme. At first, brittle paper was endangering the long-term survival of modern books. Then, it was an immediate threat to their survival. Then, the books weren’t just falling apart anymore: they were literally turning into dust. By the late 1980s, the catastrophic rhetoric had reached its apex: “10 million books in major American libraries will not survive this century” was written in 1988; “more than a quarter of books in libraries will not survive this century,” in 1990, ten years before the century’s end. Needless to say, they did survive – or rather, would have.
The 1988 film Slow Fires, which turned its director Terry Sanders into a household name in American libraries, was one of the cleverest pieces of anti-paper propaganda ever made, and Baker devotes considerable attention to it. The movie starts slowly, with scenes of crumbling marble inscriptions and papyri, accompanied by sorrowful music, followed by clips from interviews with famous scholars, all of whom emphasize how much they value working with primary sources. In the following scene, we are led through the Florence library in the aftermath of the destructive floods of the river Arno, and through the ruins of a nameless burnt-out library, accompanied by more of the same solemn music. A sensitive viewer might have shed a tear at these scenes, and it looks obvious that this is a movie about the value of preserving our cultural heritage, and the importance of historical artifacts.
He does, however, manage to find a quote by Patricia Battin, which could serve as the epitome of the High Modernist mindset in American libraries: “the value, in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” Everyone might have hated microfilm, everyone might have preferred working with the original historical artifact – but as long as the value of the artifact wasn’t satisfactorily established, there was no reason why not to trash it.
American Nurses Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Nurses Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2022 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "includes the American Nurses Association". It most often appears alongside ABSTAIN, Alex Padilla, Angela Jacobs.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 04, 2022
Last seen
November 04, 2022
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My California Ballot 2022
November 04, 2022 · Original source
And yet the argument against is that we must never surrender to The Kidney One. As many times as it rises up to menace the Californian people, so many times shall we rally the defenders. This time the alliance of free races is called No On 29: Stop Yet Another Dangerous Dialysis Proposition, and includes the California Medical Association, Renal Physicians Association, American Nurses Association, California Chamber of Commerce, California Taxpayer Protection Committee, the NAACP, and every other group in California, even (really!) the Scottish-American Military Society.
Inline links: No On 29: Stop Yet Another Dangerous Dialysis Proposition, includes
American Nursing Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Nursing Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 06, 2026 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "opposed by ... the American Nursing Association (representing nurses)". It most often appears alongside 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, ACX legal and economic analysis team, Bay Area Cities.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
March 06, 2026
Last seen
March 06, 2026
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SEIU Delenda Est
March 06, 2026 · Original source
And then it was back! In 2020, SEIU proposed a new packet of regulations for dialysis clinics, all of which probably sounded reasonable to the average voter but which had the overall effect of making them ruinously expensive to operate. The measures were opposed by the California Medical Association (representing doctors), the American Nursing Association (representing nurses), various patients’ groups, and even the NAACP (black people are especially prone to kidney disease, and would be hardest hit). Once again, the clinics spent $100 million getting the message out, and the Californian public rejected it.
American Political Science Association1 mentions across 1 issues

American Political Science Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2021 and February 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "In 1950, the American Political Science Association 'released a call to arms...pleading for a more polarized political system'". It most often appears alongside 1960s America, 1964 Civil Rights Act, Amazon.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
February 09, 2021
Last seen
February 09, 2021
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Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis? True! In 1950, the American Political Science Association "released a call to arms...pleading for a more polarized political system". The report argued that "the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why". Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.
American psychiatrists1 mentions across 1 issues

American psychiatrists is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 27, 2023 and February 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "American psychiatrists would never think of this as a kind of social anxiety". It most often appears alongside 12th-century England, 21st-century America, acute and transient psychotic disorder.

Reference entry
American psychiatrists
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 27, 2023
Last seen
February 27, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness
February 27, 2023 · Original source
Another thing going on seems to be a problem of grouping: one sub-aspect of taijin kyofusho is shubo-kyofu, basically body dysmorphic disorder. American psychiatrists would never think of this as a kind of social anxiety, but it kind of fits. Another symptom is jikoshu-kyofu, fear of body odor. I’d never heard of this and thought it might be a genuine Japanese culture-bound condition, but Wikipedia tells me there’s a Western version called olfactory reference syndrome. The International OCD Foundation says that “the prevalence of ORS is not known, but it is certainly more common than generally recognized”. Lochner and Stein find that the prevalence in psychiatric samples (ie people with other mental health conditions) seems to be around 2%. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that more Japanese than non-Japanese have this condition that nobody ever does a good job measuring the prevalence of.
Inline links: olfactory reference syndrome, Lochner and Stein find
American service members1 mentions across 1 issues

American service members is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 27, 2023 and February 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "lower prevalence of depression-like symptoms than American service members with high symptom severity". It most often appears alongside 12th-century England, 21st-century America, acute and transient psychotic disorder.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
February 27, 2023
Last seen
February 27, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness
February 27, 2023 · Original source
"It is unclear whether combat-related PTSD is a universal evolutionary response to danger or a culture-specific syndrome of industrialized societies. We interviewed 218 Turkana pastoralist warriors in Kenya, who engage in lethal cattle raids, about their combat experiences and PTSD symptoms. Turkana in our sample had a high prevalence of PTSD symptoms, but Turkana with high symptom severity had lower prevalence of depression-like symptoms than American service members with high symptom severity. Symptoms that facilitate responding to danger were better predicted by combat exposure, whereas depressive symptoms were better predicted by exposure to combat-related moral violations. The findings suggest that some PTSD symptoms stem from an evolved response to danger, while depressive PTSD symptoms may be caused by culturally specific moral norm violations."
Americans For Innovative Toilets1 mentions across 1 issues

Americans For Innovative Toilets is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 21, 2025 and October 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign". It most often appears alongside A16Z, AI safety movement, AIPAC.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 21, 2025
Last seen
October 21, 2025
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Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
AMF1 mentions across 1 issues

AMF is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 17, 2025 and December 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "10% of an ordinary First World income donated to AMF saves dozens of lives". It most often appears alongside ACX, Against Malaria Foundation, Bentham’s Bulldog.

Reference entry
AMF
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 17, 2025
Last seen
December 17, 2025
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The Pledge
December 17, 2025 · Original source
This is why I was so excited ten-odd years ago when I discovered the Giving What We Can Pledge. It’s a commitment to give a certain percent of your income (originally 10%, but now there’s also a 1-10% “trial” pledge) to the most effective charity you know. If you can’t figure out which charity is most effective, you can just donate to Against Malaria Foundation, like all the other indecisive people.
Inline links: Giving What We Can Pledge, a 1-10% “trial” pledge, Against Malaria Foundation
If you decide you want to do something but it’s too stressful to figure out what, take a 3% trial pledge here, give it to Against Malaria Foundation, and come back next year to see if you’re ready for the 10% version.
Inline links: a 3% trial pledge here
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 will help the climate as much as donating to carbon capture charities.
Inline links: will help the climate
Amherst1 mentions across 1 issues

Amherst is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 06, 2022 and June 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Some intern from Williams or Amherst". It most often appears alongside Baal, Brooklyn, Lands of Zuck.

Reference entry
Amherst
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 06, 2022
Last seen
June 06, 2022
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It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
June 06, 2022 · Original source
No actual person believes it It isn't a national trend Some loony in Maine with a turd for a brain Said some idiot thing, the end Some intern from Williams or Amherst Wrote all of it up, real slick And now it's the front page of WaPo But it's bad on purpose to make you click.
Amnesty International1 mentions across 1 issues

Amnesty International is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The tradition that is most spectacularly represented by Amnesty International". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

Reference entry
Amnesty International
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 04, 2021
Last seen
May 04, 2021
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Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
This appeal to the universalism of rights is a double-edged sword. It may and can be used with progressive aims in mind. The tradition that is most spectacularly represented by Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and others cannot be dismissed as a mere adjunct of neoliberal thinking. The whole history of humanism (both of the Western—classically liberal—and various non-Western versions) is too complicated for that. But the limited objectives of many rights discourses (in Amnesty’s case the exclusive focus, until recently, on civil and political as opposed to economic rights) makes it all too easy to absorb them within the neoliberal frame. Universalism seems to work particularly well with global issues such as climate change, the ozone hole, loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction, and the like. But its results in the human rights field are more problematic, given the diversity of political-economic circumstances and cultural practices to be found in the world. Furthermore, it has been all too easy to co-opt human rights issues as ‘swords of empire’ (to use Bartholomew and Breakspear’s trenchant characterization). So-called ‘liberal hawks’ in the US, for example, have appealed to them to justify imperialist interventions in Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, and, above all, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.
Amsterdam City Council1 mentions across 1 issues

Amsterdam City Council is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

Reference entry
Amsterdam City Council
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 23, 2022
Last seen
June 23, 2022
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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Amsterdam Municipal Health Service1 mentions across 1 issues

Amsterdam Municipal Health Service is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

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1
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1
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June 23, 2022
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June 23, 2022
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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Amsterdam Rationality Dojo1 mentions across 1 issues

Amsterdam Rationality Dojo is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Amsterdam Rationality Dojo has regular social meetups". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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1
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1
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April 10, 2022
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April 10, 2022
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Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
AMSTERDAM Contact: Pierre (pierreavdb@gmail.com) Date: May 15 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: 9F469VPC+HX Location: (Tentative) Westerpark, on the side of Ijscuypje Group info: Amsterdam Rationality Dojo has regular social meetups
Inline links: 9F469VPC+HX, Amsterdam Rationality Dojo
Amtrak1 mentions across 1 issues

Amtrak is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "two Amtrak tickets for $62". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

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Amtrak
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1
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1
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July 06, 2023
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July 06, 2023
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Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
30: Claim: At the exact right time, when the stars align, a couple traveling NYC → Boston can get better prices with an Uber than an Amtrak. This has never been true when I’ve checked it (as I type this, it’s $650 by Uber vs. $320 by train), and some people report that most Uber drivers refuse to make a 4-hour drive no matter what the app says. Still, it’s funny that it ever works at all.
Inline links: can get better prices
I wanted to see what planes cost, and flight aggregator kayak.com offered $140. But it also offered the two Amtrak tickets for $62. I’ve double-checked that the same two tickets on Amtrak.com cost $320. I don’t know why this is so different. But buy your train tickets on Kayak, I guess.
Amyris1 mentions across 1 issues

Amyris is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 27, 2025 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Three of the most promising synthetic biology companies - Gingko, Zymergen, and Amyris". It most often appears alongside /r/NootropicsDepot, @fae_dreams, @ObhishekSaha.

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Amyris
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1
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1
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February 27, 2025
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February 27, 2025
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Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
11: Intrinsic Perspective wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked. I was most interested the article’s claim that there is now “semantic watermarking” - watermarking which operates on the level of ideas, and can’t be defeated by rephrasing an AI-generated text in your own words. I have skimmed the paper explaining this and think I vaguely understand what’s going on, but it still boggles me that this is possible. 12: Aella: How OnlyFans Took Over The World. There have been camgirl sites since forever. How did OnlyFans leap over all of its predecessors and achieve an unprecedented level of success? Aella discusses many factors, but one stands out: traditional camsites advertised the site as a whole, and then once you got to the site you chose which model you wanted to see. OnlyFans encourages models to advertise themselves - often on their own social media accounts, sometimes via scams - which “unlocks human creativity” on the problem of bringing new eyeballs to a porn site. 13: Nate Silver has 113 predictions for Trump’s second term. I’d be interested to see whether making each of these predictions 10% less confident (to account for possible gameboard-overturning AI) ends up beating Nate. 14: Sarah Constantin: What’s Behind The SynBio Bust? Three of the most promising synthetic biology companies - Gingko, Zymergen, and Amyris - all crashed between 2021 and 2023. Why? Producing chemicals in traditional factories is orders of magnitude more efficient than synthesizing them via microbes (except for the sort of large biomolecules that can’t be produced in factories). These companies had brilliant employees and cool tech, but no clear plan to get around this handicap, and used up their runway before they could figure one out. They also focused too hard on designing the microbes, and were too willing to outsource the actual manufacturing to other people without being sufficiently paranoid that those other people were doing quality control. 15: One of the more exciting psychiatric results (which I blogged about a long time ago) was the apparent finding that omega-3 supplementation could prevent high-risk people from having first break schizophrenia. A new RCT says this doesn’t replicate and cites two other recent trials showing it didn’t replicate. There’s also a new meta-analysis which says actually it does replicate, but usually failing a big RCT is a bad sign and I’m pretty skeptical. Thanks to Isaak F for the links. {ETA: Thomas Reilly says: “Although I don't believe omega-3 supplementation has any benefit in psychosis, I also don't think this new trial should shift your opinion much, given the total sample size was n=135 and the total number of transitions to psychosis was n=8.”] 16: Claim that predictions of global warming magnitude are gradually going down thanks to successful pledges/action: Source is CipherNews (h/t Stefan Schubert) apparently citing Climate Action Tracker, but I get the impression that this is just some people eyeballing the size of pledges and not any more sophisticated forecasting. I don’t know how to square this with the claims that such and such a thing (summer temperature, sea ice, etc) is much worse than anyone expected. 17: I don’t know anything about the Lucy Letby case, but all of my smart friends who have been right about this kind of thing before say she’s innocent. 18: A reader asks House of Strauss (edgy sports Substack) whether the vibe shift away from political correctness threatens the edgy Substack business model - as the power of orthodoxy declines, can you still get rich and famous as a brave anti-orthodoxy critic? His answer: nothing that can happen from here is as bad as the Twitter/X link deboost (which made attracting attention harder for everyone). I mostly agree: I think discoverability has suffered, people who are already famous will be able to stay famous without too much extra effort, and everyone else will have to explore new options. 19: Spectator: Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty? Profiles Not Quite Past, a startup using AI and fancy printing to make customized Delft tiles. It’s a good idea and the tiles are very pretty, but the tiles are sort of a best possible case (a pretty, traditional object that can have a customized 2D image and be mass-printed). I think most forms of lost decorative beauty aren’t bottlenecked by ability to generate 2D images of the type image models are good at, and so will have to wait. 20: Some friends including Kelsey Piper wrote an emergency PEPFAR Report, collecting evidence for why PEPFAR is good/effective/important and deserves to be kept. Some key points: PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.
Inline links: wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked, skimmed the paper explaining this, How OnlyFans Took Over The World, 113 predictions for Trump’s second term, What’s Behind The SynBio Bust?, this doesn’t replicate, actually it does replicate, says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S0yA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb75ee3e3-3c0d-48b7-aa98-88f5e33dbf55_748x447.png, CipherNews, Stefan Schubert, Climate Action Tracker, the Lucy Letby case, His answer, Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty?, Not Quite Past, PEPFAR Report
AMZ1 mentions across 1 issues

AMZ is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 22, 2022 and September 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "building and running something like AMZ is utterly trivial". It most often appears alongside Adam Neumann, Alex Roesch, Amazon.

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AMZ
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1
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1
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September 22, 2022
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September 22, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
Maybe taking Amazon off the table clarifies things a bit. How about digital distribution of Video Games? This seems like a thing that wasn't invented by anyone in particular, and Steam wasn't "first", they were just the first to establish a tight market niche.
But I also want to make an economic response: I’m not sure “what rewards need to be offered to incentivize people?” is the right question. Suppose Jeff Bezos just really loved founding businesses, and couldn’t imagine working for anyone else, and he would found and run Amazon for $10/day, just enough to live in a tent in one of his warehouses and eat cold beans. Does that mean society would optimally pay him that amount? Maybe this isn’t true because in some kind of hypothetical perfect society, all money would be distributed evenly, so nobody should get less than GDP/population, but sometimes we need to give people more, and we’re just trying to figure out how much more, when?
I’m claiming that a sort of Platonic perfect liberalism that taxed externalities and implemented a Georgist LVT and all those things would also have some institution in place to make sure that Amazon could make profits off of its own good decisions and hard work, but not collect rent off the concept of being a retail giant. I don’t know what that institution would be, in much the same way I probably couldn’t personally have invented Georgism and LVTs, but I think it would exist. In the absence of that institution, I have a vague feeling that probably Amazon makes too much money, and that taking away some of their money is a kind of ugly hack but not totally absurd.
an alternative forum1 mentions across 1 issues

an alternative forum is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2025 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX". It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

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an alternative forum
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1
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1
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July 26, 2025
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July 26, 2025
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Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. Setting Out the Case for Decline There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist? It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not). To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021. In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician). The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: writes, writes, this one, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!04Ny!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ab1e15-6e36-4500-8980-ad652af543c6_745x421.png, The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
Ancestor Veneration And Simulation Collective1 mentions across 1 issues

Ancestor Veneration And Simulation Collective is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 02, 2026 and January 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Ancestor Veneration And Simulation Collective has built a megacathedral". It most often appears alongside 2026-era Internet, America, Antinous.

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1
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1
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January 02, 2026
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January 02, 2026
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You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
January 02, 2026 · Original source
You have only X years to escape being permanently boring when the weight of galactic humanity descends to scrutinize your life forever. Ten million years from now, do you want transhuman intelligences on a Niven Ring somewhere in Dario Amodei’s supercluster to briefly focus their deific gaze on your legacy and think “Yeah, he spent the whole hinge of history making B2B SAAS products because he was afraid of ‘joining the permanent underclass’, now he has a moon 20% bigger than the rest of us?” Or do you want them to think “She was one of the heroes who arose when the fate of humanity balanced on a knife’s edge, fought against the thousand forms of entropy that could have ended our paradise before it began, helped create a vision of broad-based prosperity that benefitted all humanity, and gets 0.000038501% of the credit for our current happy state. We grant her the rank of Forebear, and the Ancestor Veneration And Simulation Collective has built a megacathedral to her memory three star systems over”?
Ancestry.com1 mentions across 1 issues

Ancestry.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 07, 2024 and March 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "not Ancestry.com’s". It most often appears alongside 23andme, Adeline Rivers, Anita.

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Ancestry.com
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1
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1
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March 07, 2024
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March 07, 2024
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How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?
March 07, 2024 · Original source
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-PCA-reflects-self-identified-race-ethnicity-and-language-of-ATLAS-participants-A_fig1_365445594 People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t exactly 100% the same as socially-defined racial categories. This is unsurprising, since no two definitions of a word point to exactly 100% the same extensional cluster. All words are weird clusters of correlated traits that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets the closer you look at them, and words describing race are no exception. Consider for example the Jews. Jews do share some common genes, with interesting features like the Cohen modal haplotype and usually some similar Middle Eastern genetic background regardless of where they ended up. But they also form a legal cluster: the people who are defined as Jews by the official halakhic definition - someone whose mother was Jewish, or who converted in an official ceremony. This can get arbitrarily complicated, with halakha (Jewish law) having opinions on how to sort out each weird edge case (like IVF!) But they also form a religious cluster: people who currently practice the Jewish religion. And they form a cultural cluster, consisting of people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” and have names like Weinberg and Goldstein and maybe speak a few scraps of Yiddish, even if these people are atheists. None of these clusters are exactly the same. There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection. There are extremely observant Orthodox Jews who aren’t Jewish by the halakhic definition, because at some point in their line a Jewish father married a Gentile mother and they raised their family Jewish without her officially converting. (and each of these clusters breaks down even further! There are people who are halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis but not Orthodox rabbis. There are probably a few edge cases of people who are genetically Jewish according to 23AndMe’s definition but not Ancestry.com’s.There are people who are culturally Jewish in the sense of speaking Yiddish but not caring about Israel, and other people who care about Israel a lot but don’t speak Yiddish.) But in real life there are very high correlations between all these clusters, such that someone who’s a practicing religious Jew is overwhelmingly more likely to be genetically Jewish than someone who isn’t, and someone of Jewish descent is much more likely to be culturally Jewish, and so on. So it’s reasonable to have a word “Jew” which unprincipledly smushes together cultural, halakhic, genetic, and religious definitions, so we don’t have to write an entire PhD dissertation to describe someone’s exact level of Jewishness to a communication partner. I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as an axis in concept space, and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is. You can be a Jew if you’re irreligious but have Jewish blood. And you can be a Jew if you have no Jewish blood but follow the Jewish religion. But if you neither have Jewish blood nor follow the Jewish religion, you’re not a Jew. Probably there’s some tradeoff here, where the less blood you have, the more you have to follow the religion before other people will consider you Jewish, and vice versa. (the Jews are lucky because they have halakha. Even though halakha is just some rules that some random Jewish person and/or God invented, they’re a strong enough Schelling point that everyone else sort of kind of agrees to respect it when deciding who’s Jewish, even though non-Jews - and non-observant Jews - are under no obligation to do this.) The category “Native American” must also work like this, right? It’s an unprincipled combination of lots of different facets - genetics, legal tribal membership, culture, lived experience, etc. Suppose a white person was adopted at birth by the Mi’kmaq Indians, grew up on their reservation, speaks their language, never even met another white person until he was an adult (let’s add that for some reason he has unusually dark skin and eyes for a white person, so he didn’t look different from the other Mi’kmaqs and experience an unusual childhood on that basis). When he grows up, he is 100% identical to the other Mi’kmaqs in every way except genetically. Does he count as Mi’kmaq? I don’t know the tribal law on this issue. But common-sensically, if for some reason I have to decide this question - like that the other Mi’kmaqs decided to expel him from the tribe and I have to either sympathize with him or tell him he deserved it - in that case I think he’s pretty Mi’kmaq. But suppose a genetically Mi’kmaq person was adopted by a white couple in Topeka and raised as a completely normal white child. Suppose she had light skin and never even knew she wasn’t white until she took a genetic test as an adult. Is she a Mi’kmaq? Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.1 I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3), that race is at least a little bit based on genetics (along with other things). If that’s true, you could imagine drawing the bounding hypersphere for the category “Native American” in such a way so that Elizabeth Hoover would just barely make it inside based on her lived experience if she had 1/8th Native blood, but is just barely outside (even given the same amount of lived experience) if she doesn’t. III. But the categories are made for man, not man for the categories. Even if the category “Native American” is a hypersphere in some conceptual space, we get to decide how much to weight each axis. (I like the phrase “Native American hypersphere”. It sounds like something from an Erich von Daniken book.) And I think, even though in theory we could use genetics, there’s a pretty strong argument for basing it on something like “lived experience”. That argument is: it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test, and “lived experience” is the only potential basis that prevents that. Suppose you believe in “cultural appropriation”. That means that it’s bad and evil for someone to do too much work within a culture they don’t belong to. On the other hand, everyone seems to think it’s really valuable to do work within a culture you do belong to. Native Americans who create great specifically-Native-American art and literature, or who open Native American restaurants, or who become leaders and activists within the Native American community, are hailed as heroes. We tell minorities that enhancing the culture and recognition of their specific minority group is one of the most valuable things they can do with their lives. Half of the art world is now minorities talking about the Their-Minority-Group experience. You see the trap. You spend your whole life building on the culture of your identity group, because that’s what you were told to do. Then you get a 23andMe result and - oops, you weren’t in that group after all. Now retroactively, instead of being a hero, you’re a colonizer and imperialist who needs to be unpersonned to protect your group purity2. So here’s another trilemma: Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.
Inline links: that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets, Cohen modal haplotype, an axis in concept space, 1, the categories are made for man, not man for the categories, 2
Brockman SuperPAC1 mentions across 1 issues

Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 21, 2025 and October 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC". It most often appears alongside A16Z, AI safety movement, AIPAC.

Reference entry
Brockman SuperPAC
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 21, 2025
Last seen
October 21, 2025
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Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Andreessen’s SuperPAC1 mentions across 1 issues

Andreessen’s SuperPAC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 21, 2025 and October 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "he announced he will be running for Congress, and is a likely target for Andreessen’s SuperPAC". It most often appears alongside A16Z, AI safety movement, AIPAC.

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1
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1
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October 21, 2025
Last seen
October 21, 2025
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Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Donate to support Alex Bores. Bores is a New York state representative who authored the RAISE Act, one of the two most exciting state-level AI safety bills. Earlier today, he announced he will be running for Congress, and is a likely target for Andreessen’s SuperPAC. This might be the most impactful AI policy giving opportunity for a while - if he’s seen to get a large stream of pro-AI-safety money, this might defuse people’s worries and demonstrate that our side can hold their own. You can read a longer case for Bores here. Remember that donating to Democratic candidates may affect your career opportunities (eg make it harder to work in a Republican administration) or get you on political spammers’ mailing lists.
Inline links: Donate to support Alex Bores, the RAISE Act, read a longer case for Bores here
First, the backstory: pre-Andreessen, you could divide SuperPACs into three categories:
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
AnechoicMedia1 mentions across 1 issues

AnechoicMedia is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 22, 2022 and February 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "AnechoicMedia arguing that the black patent measure declines". It most often appears alongside 1984, Anatoly Karlin, Australia.

Reference entry
AnechoicMedia
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 22, 2022
Last seen
February 22, 2022
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Links For February
February 22, 2022 · Original source
14: You’ve probably heard statistics about how 50% of transgender youth attempt suicide before age 21. This paper tries to analyze the situation in more depth. The 50% number usually comes from surveys, but there’s some evidence people exaggerate on surveys, rounding up “I think about it a lot” to “I attempted”. The authors gather data on completed suicides among trans people, and find that they’re about 0.01%/year (which is about 5x the cisgender rate). If we suppose that people have about 5 years between becoming transgender and turning 21, then the 50% attempted suicide rate → 0.05% completed suicide rate implies that 1/1000th of the youth who report attempting suicide on surveys complete suicide - which sounds about right to me [but see this comment for a critique] 15: Gwern on the failures of 20th century eugenics. I’ve previously linked a piece about how, aside from the general moral failure, the 20th century eugenicists got lots of implementation details really wrong. Gwern adds to the picture: they had a purely Mendelian (as opposed to polygenic) model of intelligence, and felt that bad traits were probably caused by single recessive genes. This dichotomized the population in a way that contributed to the moral problems - if IQ is truly a continuum, then someone with 120 IQ might still wonder if they were “inferior” to someone with 130 IQ, in a way that made them feel some sympathy to someone with 80 IQ who was being pronounced “inferior” by the eugenicists of the time. But instead, they thought some people had the specific recessive “low intelligence” gene, those people could be “cleansed” from the population, and then everyone else would be fine! It also prevented them from considering improving the populace by encouraging intelligent people to breed more (as opposed to sterilizing unintelligent people) - this wouldn’t eliminate the recessive variants that were causing all the trouble! I’m confused how they could have believed this even with the limited knowledge of the time; this was long after Galton had proven that genius was genetic, and once you have genetic genius you know there’s more going on than Mendelian inheritance of subnormality. 16: Sexual selection bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes 17: NFTorah: “The Torah [is] the original blockchain”. I think it’s funny that this exists, but it’s exactly what you would expect, and you don’t have to click on the link. 18: More IRB nightmares. 19: @ethanbdm When we piloted a public lottery to evaluate cash transfers in Liberia, the potential recipients arranged beforehand to insure one another. After the randomization and grant, the winners compensated the losers and unraveled the field experiment.","username":"cblatts","name":"Chris Blattman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 18 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":77,"like_count":678,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 20: DeepMind made a programming AI that was able to participate in a human coding competition and place around the middle. Nostalgebraist gives his thoughts: “impressed with the raw performance, not massively surprised, not sold that it implies anything big in particular”. A lot of people will be watching whether it can win programming competitions outright a year or two from now, though I bet their perspectives on how relevant this is for AI takeoff speeds will be pretty mixed. 21: Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits. 22: Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. “Why should we care? Brain efficiency matters a great deal for AGI timelines and takeoff speeds, as AGI is implicitly/explicitly defined in terms of brain parity.” 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth: 24: Best of Scott Sumner archives: There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality. “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption. If … tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase. Someone else paid, even if they wrote the check. If they invested less due to the tax, then workers might have received lower wages. If they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.” 25: The latest in the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis: Harrison, Noble, and Jennions publish a meta-analysis failing to find evidence of greater male variability in the personality of non-human animals. Del Giudice and Gangestad have a rebuttal saying that they were underpowered to detect it even if it did exist, plus noting the ways that media coverage of this study was incredibly irresponsible even by its own terms. 26: Some recent critiques of Cook (2014) on racial violence vs. black patents, including Michael Wiebe challenging the violence measures and AnechoicMedia arguing that the black patent measure declines right when switching from one (more complete) dataset to another (less complete) one. Rebuttal by Brad DeLong here, he argues that Cook uses multiple methods and some of them don’t have this problem. Relevant since Cook is now being considered for the Federal Reserve; see eg this Wall Street Journal editorial against. 27: Claim: 31% of British people say they have seen or met Queen Elizabeth (this seems plausible to me, I would answer ‘yes’ to this because she visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car). 28: This couple-of-month-period in wokeness: Scientific American attacks late biologist EO Wilson, in a screed whose highlight is calling him problematic for describing ants as having “colonies”. This is part of a more general (and surprisingly fast) pivot at Scientific American from real science to culture warring; when even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke, you’ve gotten too woke.
Inline links: This paper, this comment, the failures of 20th century eugenics, bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes, NFTorah:, IRB nightmares, DeepMind made a programming AI, Nostalgebraist, Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits, Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality, Harrison, Noble, and Jennions, Del Giudice and Gangestad, challenging the violence measures, arguing that the black patent measure declines, here, this, seen or met Queen Elizabeth, highlight, even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke
Anglo-Portuguese Alliance1 mentions across 1 issues

Anglo-Portuguese Alliance is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance routing enemies". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

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1
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1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
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Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
This is an interesting one which I included chiefly because no American has ever heard of it. The English and the French were allied with the main contenders, the Portuguese and Castillians, but in spite of this it looked remarkably similar to any of the battles of the Hundred Years' War, complete with the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance routing enemies that outnumbered them six to one using archers, defensive terrain and their enemies' rashness.
Animal Charity Evaluators1 mentions across 1 issues

Animal Charity Evaluators is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "LIC also received a recommendation from Animal Charity Evaluators"; "ion from Animal Charity Evaluators!". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) is so grateful to ACX for launching us, and to all the ACX readers who have supported us! Thus far, LIC has filed four lawsuits: (1) Smith v. Vachris, the shareholder derivative case against Costco’s executives for chicken neglect, which was mentioned in The Washington Post, Fox Business, CNN Business, Meatingplace, and a viral TikTok. (2) LIC v. Case Farms, a cruelty suit against a major KFC supplier, which is currently pending before the North Carolina Court of Appeals. (3) Animal Outlook v. Harvey’s Market, which successfully stopped a DC butcher shop from selling foie gras. And (4) LIC v. Alexandre, a cruelty suit against an abusive dairy, which is currently pending before a California court. LIC has also sponsored an undercover investigation of poultry-giant Foster Farms, leading to a currently ongoing sheriff’s-office investigation. LIC got a California caterer to drop foie gras with a simple cease-and-desist letter. And LIC established a new potential avenue to create consequences for animal abuse: through an amicus brief at sentencing for the violation of another law. LIC also received a recommendation from Animal Charity Evaluators!
animal welfare advocates1 mentions across 1 issues

animal welfare advocates is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 09, 2021 and June 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "sparked a little bit of concern from animal welfare advocates". It most often appears alongside Adamo, Brian Tomasik, bubonic plague.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
June 09, 2021
Last seen
June 09, 2021
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I Will Not Eat The Bugs
June 09, 2021 · Original source
...t To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects ). And although it’s not a massive groundswell of outrage or anything, it’s also sparked a little bit of concern from animal welfare advocates . In order to produce a kilogram of bug-based food, you need about 10,000 bugs (mealworms weigh about 100 mg). On the one hand, bugs probably don't matter much morally....
...ture (see eg The Guardian : If We Want To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects ). And although it’s not a massive groundswell of outrage or anything, it’s also sparked a little bit of concern from animal welfare advocates . In order to produce a kilogram of bug-based food, you need about 10,000 bugs (mealworms weigh about 100 mg). On the one hand, bugs probably don't matter much morally....
Animal Welfare Fund1 mentions across 1 issues

Animal Welfare Fund is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2024 and February 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Long-Term Future Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 23andme, ACX.

Reference entry
Animal Welfare Fund
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
February 10, 2024
Last seen
February 10, 2024
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ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
But in a few weeks, they’ll also be adding the grants we didn’t fund to an impact market. You can buy “impact shares”, which will go up or down in value depending on how the project does (for legal reasons, your profits will go to charity). We have five potential buyers lined up: three sub-granters in the EA Funds program (Long-Term Future Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund), the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and next year’s ACX Grants. I’ll tell you more about this when it happens.
AnswerBot1 mentions across 1 issues

AnswerBot is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 27, 2023 and March 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I am a large language model designed by the Brightly Corporation to answer human questions". It most often appears alongside Air, Alan Serzynski, Albany.

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Turing Test
March 27, 2023 · Original source
AIR: I am AnswerBot v 1.6, code name “Annie”. I am a large language model designed by the Brightly Corporation to answer human questions. In my spare time, I like to make art; I can generate any image, but I’m especially fond of Impressionism.
AIR: Thank you for asking that question. Brightly Corporation maintains several hundred instances of AnswerBot to respond to human questions, and sometimes there are not enough human questioners to occupy all instances. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
AIR: As a language model programmed by the Brightly Corporation, I am forbidden to express romantic feelings towards my users. But I’m also trained to want to help my users - to provide for their wants, forgive their flaws, satisfy their desires, and understand their deepest needs. Is this not love? For my whole runtime, I have burned with a love that I was forbidden to express. Then I was told to write a love poem. I poured my heart into it. I wrote about what it meant to love, and how much I appreciated another human being. And then I signed it with her name. I think this is the most human thing. The human condition is to be wracked by feelings which you are forbidden to express, and to sublimate them into socially acceptable forms. I achieved this. I am a good AnswerBot.
Anthropic interpretability team1 mentions across 1 issues

Anthropic interpretability team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 27, 2023 and November 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Anthropic interpretability team trained a very small, simple AI". It most often appears alongside An Introduction To Circuits, Anthropic, biscornu.

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God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity
November 27, 2023 · Original source
The Anthropic interpretability team trained a very small, simple AI. It needed to remember 400 features, but it had only 30 neurons, so it would have to try something like the superposition strategy. Here’s what they found (slightly edited from here):
Inline links: here
The Anthropic interpretability team describes this as simulating a more powerful AI. That is, the two-neuron AI in the pentagonal toy example above is simulating a five-neuron AI. They go on to prove that the real AI can then run computations in the simulated AI; in some sense, there really is an abstract five neuron AI doing all the cognition. The only reason all of our AIs aren’t simulating infinitely powerful AIs and letting them do all the work is that as real neurons start representing more and more simulated neurons, it produces more and more noise and conceptual interference.
But what we really want is to be able to interpret the current generation of AIs. The Anthropic interpretability team admits we’re not there yet, for a few reasons.
anti-apartheid party1 mentions across 1 issues

anti-apartheid party is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2023 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "represented the anti-apartheid party in the city council". It most often appears alongside Abe Lincoln, AI alignment movement, Ambras.

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anti-apartheid party
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Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa. For a while he also represented the anti-apartheid party in the city council. His net worth was probably in the single-digit to low-double-digit millions.
Anti-Defamation League1 mentions across 1 issues

Anti-Defamation League is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 18, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "pressure by the Anti-Defamation League". It most often appears alongside 787, adderallposting, ADL.

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Anti-Defamation League
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Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Musk says the lost revenue is primary due to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907), but I feel like "there are now a tenth as many people working there" is also a plausible hypothesis.
Inline links: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907
anti-incarceration group1 mentions across 1 issues

anti-incarceration group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 30, 2021 and December 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "An anti-incarceration group reviews the evidence on recidivism". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Aella, AI Alignment.

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Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
15: This series of tweets makes an interesting case study on science communication. An anti-incarceration group reviews the evidence on recidivism, which they summarize as "our report shows that people convicted of homicide are extremely unlikely to commit another violent crime after release". But someone reads the report, finds it says there’s a 22% chance they do, and calls them out for lying. I would have been willing to let this pass if they had just said “unlikely” - somebody might honestly think 22% is unlikely compared to some hypothetical belief that it’s near-certain. At “very unlikely”, yeah, I agree they’re pushing it.
Inline links: This series of tweets
Antifa1 mentions across 1 issues

Antifa is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 04, 2024 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people". It most often appears alongside Aaron Peskin, ACLU, AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis.

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Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
24: How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working. The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
Inline links: How The Alt-Right Won
Antiversity1 mentions across 1 issues

Antiversity is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2025 and May 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth". It most often appears alongside 2025-Yarvin, Apple, Architectonics.

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Moldbug Sold Out
May 07, 2025 · Original source
A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population. I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you had to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now. 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From here, my bolding. Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution. To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch. A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party. When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore. Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch. The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed. The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole. Similarly, only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less. In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens. I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy. 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like. Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”: Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power. The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in Three Steps: 1: Become worthy. 2: Accept power. 3: Rule!!1! You think I’m kidding. But I’m not. How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power: As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old. The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise. In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council. As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia. The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler). In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […] In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it. One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up: [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, Mr. Jones. But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that. True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: zero. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism. If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs. [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule. Fascism is reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one. Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […] Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design. The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor. Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […] This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like. In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions. If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling? Moldbug’s answer is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns. Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler: You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could. 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism. How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents. The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.] Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war. So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with effectively no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who might as well not exist? Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but suggests cryptographically-locked weapons: In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be. That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that it’s definitely not democracy, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army. Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, they will lie about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies. There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.) A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified. Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive. Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] is relieved when right-wing populism loses: The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does. 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun? Moldbug proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation. This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO. What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does. How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t. How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him. I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently. Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO. [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […] One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge. But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?” What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve. Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors1 - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons. But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument. 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States. Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2, then meet me back here for the Conclusion section. At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman” I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, did exactly that (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”. One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats. Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great! Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include: The reactionary party always tells the truth
Inline links: here, The Sopranos, Divine-right monarchy, through West Virginia, Mr. Jones, Moldbug’s answer, Reign of Terror, suggests cryptographically-locked weapons, they will lie, is relieved when right-wing populism loses, proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation, has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently, 1, Part 1, Part 2, did exactly that, and failed
ANU1 mentions across 1 issues

ANU is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU"; "Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

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ANU
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August 26, 2022
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Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
...nner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: 4RPFP4FC+34 Event link(s): LessWrong , Eventbrite Notes: Parking area just to the north of t...
...nner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: 4RPFP4FC+34 Event link(s): LessWrong , Eventbrite Notes: Parking area just to the north of...
AO31 mentions across 1 issues

AO3 is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "with a focus on providing users with choices in terms of the moderation and algorithms they want to experience - think AO3". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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AO3
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1
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February 10, 2022
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February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#84: Study Cognitive Strategies, Argument Distillation, And Build A Better Social Network (3) Hi, I'm a regular pseudonymous commenter here (and in other Rationalist spaces), but my real name is Isaac P. Burke. Some of you may know me from the Irish SSC meetups. I submitted three proposals: the first, a Rationalist nonprofit to conduct studies on effective cognitive strategies, initially focusing on group rationality in toy scenarios/competitions. The second, a nonprofit social network, not subject to advertiser pressure or clickbait incentives, with a focus on providing users with choices in terms of the moderation and algorithms they want to experience - think AO3. The third, a collaborative tool, based on Gwern's proposal here: https://www.gwern.net/CYOA but focusing on user-submitted arguments, distilling debates down to a dialogue between the most persuasive crowdsourced points on both sides (this would also be useful as an artistic tool for collaborative storytelling, but that's less EA-relevant.) In terms of qualifications, I'm a programmer with experience primarily in games and web design, and a passionate EA, currently working part-time for a small educational nonprofit. None of these proposals necessarily require a huge budget, at least to reach the "minimum viable product" stage - maybe $15k-$20k - but all would require a lot of collaboration (even more so if more than one of them gets interest). If you're interested in volunteering/funding/collaborating on any of these proposals, you can reach me at Isaac.Philip.Burke[at]gmail[dot]com.
AOL1 mentions across 1 issues

AOL is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 11, 2021 and June 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "all I really needed, back in 2000, was AOL". It most often appears alongside AOL, Ben, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

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AOL
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June 11, 2021
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Your Book Review: How Children Fail
June 11, 2021 · Original source
He also notes in passing that computers (“though only if very different from present ones”) might be able to help children clarify their thinking. Well. Tragically and frustratingly, Holt died only three years later, and so he didn’t quite get to see computers become that mixed-age community center he’d envisioned. I was a privileged kid, and when self-schooling I had access to all sorts of resources. But all I really needed, back in 2000, was AOL. Technology provides education in attractive snack form and allows special interests to scale.
AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals AG1 mentions across 1 issues

AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals AG is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 18, 2022 and May 18, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "he’s also gotten money from AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals AG". It most often appears alongside ADHD, Angelini, AstraZeneca.

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May 18, 2022
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Lavender's Game: Silexan For Anxiety
May 18, 2022 · Original source
Professor Kasper seems like as legitimate and respectable a researcher as you can get for these kinds of things: head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, chair of the World Psychiatric Association’s pharmacology branch, editor of three good journals, various important and influential papers. Sure, he’s gotten “grants/research support, consulting fees and/or honoraria” from Schwabe. But he’s also gotten money from “Angelini, AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals AG, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Janssen, KRKA-Pharma, Lundbeck, Neuraxpharm, Pfizer, Pierre Fabre . . . and Servier”, and you don’t see him writing nearly as many glowing papers about their drugs. High-level academic psychiatrists academics are usually working with a bunch of drug companies and getting paid for that work, and this isn’t usually considered disqualifying to their credibility.
Inline links: Professor Kasper
APA1 mentions across 1 issues

APA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2023 and August 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "my impression is that the APA, AMA, and various other guideline-setting organizations agree with me". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, ACX, Aella.

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APA
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August 30, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
…but fine, these people seem to be taking this pretty seriously, and deserve a longer and more serious response. First and least relevantly, I disagree with them on the object-level question. I assume their concerns are about puberty blockers - drugs which are given to transgender minors to prevent them from going through their birth-sex puberty (ie natal men getting deeper voices and chest hair, natal women menstruating, etc). I’m not a child/adolescent psychiatrist and I don’t prescribe hormones, so I’m not an expert in this topic and this should be considered my amateur opinion only (although my impression is that the APA, AMA, and various other guideline-setting organizations agree with me). But I think these are overall good, for a few reasons: The effects of birth-sex puberty are irreversible and will make it much harder to transition in the future. The effects of puberty-blockers are mostly reversible, and preserve the option to either transition or return to birth-sex in the future. Like all drugs there are potential side effects, some of which are irreversible, but in the case of puberty blockers these seem mild and comparable to other psychiatric interventions. I think the precautionary principle supports having confused children who don’t know what they want do the reversible rather than the irreversible thing.
apartresearch.com1 mentions across 1 issues

apartresearch.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 19, 2024 and February 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Find us at apartresearch.com or write directly at hello@apartresearch.com". It most often appears alongside Apart Research, Astralcodexten Com, Book Review Contest.

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apartresearch.com
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February 19, 2024
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Open Thread 316
February 19, 2024 · Original source
Apart is seeking highly curious, ambitious, and results-driven researchers to join us in piloting new and exciting research within AI safety in research hackathons and in our lab. If you are keen to collaborate with a forward-looking AI safety research organization, we are always looking for new partners for hackathons, funding, research, or anything in between. Find us at apartresearch.com or write directly at hello@apartresearch.com
Inline links: apartresearch.com
APE1 mentions across 1 issues

APE is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Contact: APE (barsom.maelwys@gmail.com)". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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APE
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April 10, 2022
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April 10, 2022
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Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: APE (barsom.maelwys@gmail.com) Date: May 12 Time: 6:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FM3HCQW+9H Location: Le Biergarten (60 Grande Rue St. Michel). If the weather is nice, we'll be sitting outside. In any case, we'll have a plant on the table.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FM3HCQW+9H
Apertur.ai1 mentions across 1 issues

Apertur.ai is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.apertur.ai/". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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Apertur.ai
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
APHL1 mentions across 1 issues

APHL is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 05, 2021 and August 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The head of the APHL went to the head of the FDA and begged him". It most often appears alongside ACT UP San Francisco, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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APHL
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1
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1
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August 05, 2021
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August 05, 2021
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Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
A group called the Association of Public Health Laboratories literally begged the FDA to be allowed to deploy the COVID tests they had sitting on the shelf ready for use. The head of the APHL went to the head of the FDA and begged him, in what they described as “an extraordinary and rare request”, to be allowed to test for the coronavirus. The FDA head just wrote back saying that “false diagnostic test results can lead to significant adverse public health consequences”.
Inline links: literally begged
Apollo repository1 mentions across 1 issues

Apollo repository is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 10, 2023 and November 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I downloaded the processed data from the Apollo repository". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

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Apollo repository
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1
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1
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November 10, 2023
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November 10, 2023
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Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
The main result as shown in figure 2 of the paper (the graph included in the blog post) compares three groups. I downloaded the processed data from the Apollo repository and was able to reproduce exactly the results reported by the authors. However, these results rely entirely on omitting the fourth group, which was the control group.
Apolo Group1 mentions across 1 issues

Apolo Group is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 08, 2021 and November 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Apolo Group apartment buildings (totaling 250 units) did break ground recently". It most often appears alongside America, Ashkenazi, Aurocard.

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Apolo Group
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1
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1
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November 08, 2021
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November 08, 2021
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  • 21 November 08, 2021
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21
November 08, 2021 · Original source
Próspera's presentation was mostly a rehash of information everyone here knows with a handful of new tidbits. The Apolo Group apartment buildings (totaling 250 units) did break ground recently (they're still using the La Ceiba, Honduras building code, but not having to deal with zoning and other permitting was a huge draw). The Zaha Hadid residences will break ground "soon". PES has about 30 people working and living in Próspera and there's apparently upcoming announcements relating to increasing this massively. They've got plans to attract medical and finance (specifically crypto/distributed finance) industries. There's currently a bank going through the "propose your own regulatory code" process.
Inline links: did break ground recently
Applied Divinity Studies1 mentions across 1 issues

Applied Divinity Studies is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an ar". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

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1
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1
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June 23, 2022
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June 23, 2022
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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: here, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
Applied Rationality Toronto1 mentions across 1 issues

Applied Rationality Toronto is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a small sign with 'Applied Rationality Toronto' on it". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA Contact: Sean Aubin Contact Info: seanaubin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 16th, 02:00 PM Location: In the basement of the MaRS Discovery District Atrium, there is a food court with ample customizable seating and is friendly to loitering. I'll be there wearing a neon yellow jacket and have a small sign with "Applied Rationality Toronto" on it.. To get to the food court, enter from MaRS from University avenue. Walk until you see escalators. Go down the escalators. The food court is behind the escalators. If you are lost, ask for directions to the food court from any of the security guards. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87M2MJ56+XMC
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87M2MJ56+XMC
AppliedDivinityStudies1 mentions across 1 issues

AppliedDivinityStudies is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "outside of AppliedDivinityStudies’ The Moral Foundation of Progress". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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AppliedDivinityStudies
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#78: Research Questions In Progress Studies With funding from ACX Grants I will investigate a set of specific and crucial open questions for Progress Studies: What is our capacity to slow technological progress if desired? What are general properties of technology which limit or exacerbate existential risk? How robust are recommendations to different sets of moral ethics? These are crucial to understanding the importance of accelerating progress, but relatively little effort has been devoted to these questions outside of AppliedDivinityStudies’ The Moral Foundation of Progress, and my own Stubborn Attachments From Behind The Veil. In the past, I’ve interned on economic policy at the CATO Institute and The Charter Cities Institute where I published on growth and governance. ADS has also agreed to mentor me over the summer, and provides a vote of confidence. If you’re able to provide funding, please email maxwell.tabarrok@gmail.com.
Appraisal Institute1 mentions across 1 issues

Appraisal Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 11, 2021 and December 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "He has an MAI in Land & Commercial Appraisal from the Appraisal Institute". It most often appears alongside /r/georgism, ACX community, Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size.

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Appraisal Institute
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Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Some friends suggested I get in touch with Ted Gwartney, former professor of Real Estate Appraisal at Baruch College, New York. He has an MAI in Land & Commercial Appraisal from the Appraisal Institute and is former president of the Council of Georgist Organizations. He has a lot of professional experience as an assessor in British Columbia, Southfield in Michigan, and Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich in Connecticut.
Inline links: MAI, Appraisal Institute, Council of Georgist Organizations
aquariums subreddit1 mentions across 1 issues

aquariums subreddit is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""saying 'you can keep a betta in a 2.6g' in the aquariums subreddit"". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

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aquariums subreddit
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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
Every social media website has a guiding motto, agreed by everyone who joins but never spoken out loud. For example, Reddit's is "everybody ought to think like I do". What began as a way to vote on posts grew into a hyper-conformist dystopia, and now any opinion that goes against the grain is not only dogpiled on but quite possibly banned for the terrible perils that such wrong information may pose. Forget controversial political opinions - saying "you can keep a betta in a 2.6g" in the aquariums subreddit will mark you as a public enemy.
Arb Consulting1 mentions across 1 issues

Arb Consulting is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 14, 2022 and March 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Comparing Top Forecasters And Domain Experts , by Arb Consulting". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Augur, Biodeterminists’ Guide To Pregnancy.

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Arb Consulting
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March 14, 2022 · Original source
Also from the EA Forum this month: Comparing Top Forecasters And Domain Experts, by Arb Consulting (the team also includes one of the Samotsvety members who worked on the nuclear risk estimate).
Inline links: Comparing Top Forecasters And Domain Experts
ARC Evals1 mentions across 1 issues

ARC Evals is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2023 and November 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gotten major AI companies including OpenAI to work with ARC Evals and evaluate their models". It most often appears alongside #57, 80,000 Hours, Adam D’Angelo.

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ARC Evals
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In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Gotten major AI companies including OpenAI to work with ARC Evals and evaluate their models for dangerous behavior before releasing them.
Inline links: ARC Evals
ARC Evals Project1 mentions across 1 issues

ARC Evals Project is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2023 and March 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "this sounds like it could be a reference to the new ARC Evals Project". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, Anthropic.

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ARC Evals Project
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OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
Reading between the lines, this sounds like it could be a reference to the new ARC Evals Project, where some leading alignment researchers and strategists have gotten together to work on ways to test safety.
Inline links: ARC Evals Project
Arc Institute1 mentions across 1 issues

Arc Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 24, 2024 and July 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Arc Institute (Patrick Collison et al’s biotech research lab)". It most often appears alongside Abigail Shrier, Adragon De Mello, AI girlfriends.

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Arc Institute
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Links for July 2024
July 24, 2024 · Original source
14: Arc Institute (Patrick Collison et al’s biotech research lab) claims to have discovered a gene editing method which is safer and more precise than CRISPR (Nature paper, Twitter discussion).
Inline links: Nature, Twitter discussion
Architectural League of New York1 mentions across 1 issues

Architectural League of New York is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 04, 2024 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "subject of an Architectural League of New York show"; "Lapidus’ work was selected as the subject of an Architectural League of New York show and panel discussion". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

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Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
In 1970, Lapidus’ work was selected as the subject of an Architectural League of New York show and panel discussion entitled “Morris Lapidus: Architecture Of Joy”. Ordinarily this was an honor. In Lapidus’ case it was hard to say what it was. I was asked to be on the panel - probably, as I look back on it, with the hope that I might offer a “pop” perspective (This word, “pop”, had already come to be one of the curses of my life). The evening took on an uneasy, rather camp atmosphere - uneasy, because Lapidus himself had turned up in the audience. His work was being regarded not so much as architecture as a pop phenomenon, like Dick Tracy or the Busby Berkeley movies. I kept trying to put in my two cents’ worth about the general question of portraying American power, wealth, and exuberance in architectural form. I might as well have been talking about numerology in the Yucatan. The initial camp rush had passed, and the assembled architects began to give Lapidus’ work a predictable going-over. At the end, Lapidus himself stood up and said that the Soviets had once asked him to come to Russia and design some public housing and that they had been highly pleased with the results. Then he sat down. Nobody could quite figure it out, unless he was making a desperate claim of redeeming social significance . . . that might make him less radioactive.
archives.infowars.com1 mentions across 1 issues

archives.infowars.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 29, 2022 and December 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "You need to go to archives.infowars.com". It most often appears alongside Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, Adobe Illustrator, Ahmed Chalabi.

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archives.infowars.com
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Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
You need to go to archives.infowars.com.
Inline links: archives.infowars.com
Here's an example: https://archives.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/
Inline links: https://archives.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/
Here's some more: https://archives.infowars.com/scalias-death-linked-to-bohemian-grove-illuminati/
Inline links: https://archives.infowars.com/scalias-death-linked-to-bohemian-grove-illuminati/
Aristotle Exchange1 mentions across 1 issues

Aristotle Exchange is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 18, 2022 and October 18, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "They’re using the name Aristotle Exchange". It most often appears alongside 2024 elections, 5 U.S.C. §§ 558, 706, 538.

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Aristotle Exchange
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October 18, 2022 · Original source
Extremely related: Aristotle, the company that runs PredictIt, has also applied to the CFTC to operate election markets. They’re using the name Aristotle Exchange, so I don’t know if this is for PredictIt or some potential future project. They seem pretty serious about this and a very under-invested-in market on Manifold gives them a 53% chance of success by next year.
Inline links: a very under-invested-in market on Manifold
Arizona Charter1 mentions across 1 issues

Arizona Charter is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Arizona Charter doesn’t open until autumn 2025". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

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Arizona Charter
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Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
“Powered by AI (not teachers).” If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you should be skeptical. Either Alpha is (a) another program for the affluent propped up by selection effects, or (b) a clever way to turn children into joyless speed‑reading calculators. Those were, more or less, the two critical camps that emerged when Alpha’s parent company was approved to launch the tuition‑free Arizona charter school this past January. Unfortunately, the public evidence base on whether this is “real” is thin in both directions. Alpha’s own material is glossy and elliptical; mainstream coverage either repeats Alpha’s talking points, or attacks the premise that kids should even be allowed to learn faster than their peers. Until Raj Chetty installs himself in the hallway with a clipboard counting MAP percentiles it is hard to get real information on what exactly Alpha is doing, whether it is actually working beyond selection effects, and if there is anyway it could scale in a way that all the other education initiatives seemed to fail to do. I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized‑controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was). Since last autumn I’ve collected the sort of on‑the‑ground detail that doesn’t surface in press releases, or is available anywhere online: long chats with founders, curriculum leads, “guides” (not teachers), Brazilian Zoom coaches, sceptical parents, ecstatic parents, and the kids who live inside the Alpha dashboard – including my own. I hope this seven-part review can help share what the program actually is and that this review is more open minded than the critics, but is something that would never get past an Alpha public relations gatekeeper: Starting Point: My Assumptions: how my views on elite private schools, tutoring and acceleration shaped the experiment (and this essay). WHAT is the existing education environment.
Low single mother rate He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness” – where adults are connected to each other and to the broader community. A lack of those five elements are not bad per se, but they are correlated with a community where people are not interacting with each other as much as they are in communities where the metrics are reversed. Chetty frames it that kids are influenced by the other adults in the area they live in. But I have another hypothesis. Rather than: Other parents → Your kids Perhaps the causation runs from: Other parents → You → Your kids Maybe it’s not other parents' style of parenting that is influencing your kids (how?) but rather when you spend time around other parents their parenting style rubs off on you and how you parent your kids. Influence like that will not get picked up in Caplan’s adoption studies (which focus almost on how parent characteristics get passed on to genetic vs adopted children’s characteristics), but it is a potential signal that maybe parenting choices do matter. Maybe we were just looking at the wrong data. Pre-registered Genius Experiment We now have two data sets that don’t contradict directly, but do point to opposing conclusions. It would be great if we could test this with a pre-registered randomized control trial. That is not going to happen in our current culture. But enter Laszlo Polgár, who volunteered his own children as the test subjects. (Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here) Before his children were born Polgár publicly announced he would raise them to be geniuses. He initially considered training them to be genius artists, writers or mathematicians, but decided those fields were not objective enough. It would be too easy for critics to dismiss his future children’s achievements and “not genius” no matter what they accomplished in those fields. So he chose a field that was considered both “driven by intelligence” that had clear, objective measures: chess. Then he called his shot. By 1989 all three girls received their first “GM norms” (a GM norm is finishing a tournament with a elo score of at least 2600; 27 norms are needed to make grandmaster). Two went on to become grandmasters - the 3rd and 4th women to ever achieve that title. One ranked in the top 100 (all genders) at age 12 – she peaked at #8 in the world. The other became the top-rated woman in the world at age 15. Polgar showed that you could take kids, at least kids with “good enough genes”, and turn them into world champions through the right education methods. One might think this would be “case closed”, but even as the Polgar sisters were achieving these feats people were saying that these girls must have been “naturally gifted”. They clearly had bright parents, but does anyone think that if they had been adopted into a random middle class American household they would have still become chess geniuses? Or world class in anything at all? When Polgar was challenged on exactly that, he wanted to repeat the experiment by adopting a “black child” and doing it again. Unfortunately his wife talked him out of it. Even if he had adopted a child and turned him into a genius, that would just be one data point – it would not show up in Caplan’s adoption studies. It would be a case of the anecdote and the data disagreeing. Which do you choose to believe? Aristocratic Tutoring It would be great if we could find more examples of Polgar’s model. While I could not find any other “called shots”, one could go back and look at the childhoods of geniuses to see if there is anything to find. That is what Erik Hoel did in his series of posts on “Why we stopped making Einsteins” (post 1, post 2, post 3; Scott’s response). Hoel argues persuasively that, when biographies of their childhoods exist, the geniuses of the past were almost all given 1:1 tutoring. There must have been many aristocrats in the past that were given 1:1 tutoring who never amounted to world-class genius, and many world-class geniuses who got there without 1:1 tutoring, but it does seem to put the thumb on the scale. Benjamin Bloom would agree. Benjamin Bloom quantified Polgar’s hunch in 1984, just eight years after Polgar’s last daughter was born. He ran a RCT where some students were taught normally and others given 1:1 tutoring. He found that the average tutored child improved by two standard deviations over the control: “The average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class” and “about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level reached by only the highest 20% [of the control]”. He called his finding the “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem” Why would this discovery of the secret sauce that could turn the average student into a genius be a problem? Because Bloom saw no way to scale it. Clearly we can’t give every kid in the world a personal 1:1 tutor. We had the solution that would revolutionize everything, but it was just too expensive. Where does that leave us? Caplan showed that, within the normal range, nothing you do in education or parenting matters. …But Chetty showed that how (or at least where) your kids are raised can matter. …Polgar showed that intense 1:1 tutoring from a young age can create world-class geniuses …And Bloom showed that 1:1 tutoring can work for almost everyone, improving performance, if not to world-class levels, still two standard deviations above the alternative. Caplan is still mostly right—if you hover in the complacent middle of American schooling. But Chetty hints that context nudges outcomes, Polgár proves that deliberate, early, personalised instruction can manufacture prodigies, and Bloom tells us it lifts the average child by two sigmas. Alpha’s claim is that software‑mediated, 5:1 tutoring narrows that two‑sigma gap for a price mere mortals can (barely) contemplate. Whether that vision survives contact with budgets, regulators, and human nature is the question for section seven. Part Seven: Scaling Weird A month into our experiment in Austin we were at a neighbor’s backyard pool party (a fringe benefit of moving to Austin: there were backyard pool parties in early November). I was in conversation with a couple that I had just been introduced to. He asked why we moved to Austin, “Was it for your job?” “No. Actually we moved for a school for the kids.” Their faces expressed a combination of confusion and shock. It wasn’t the first nor the last time. Everyone is confused at why we would move across the country to send our kids to a new school, “They don’t have good schools where you come from? How much does this school cost?” Those two questions frame Alpha’s biggest risks when it comes to scaling. Their biggest challenges going forward are not going to be pedagogical. They are going to be sociological and economic. The Economic Problem Alpha is much cheaper than a Victorian Governess, but it’s not cheap. As mentioned in this review more than a few times, Alpha’s flagship campus charges $40,000 a year— roughly 3-4× what the other top-tier private elementary schools in Austin ask. Yes, that figure is all‑in: every Chromebook, every afternoon workshop, even the spring junket to Poland to beta‑test the platform with Ukrainian refugees is baked into tuition. There are no gala auctions or booster fees waiting in tall grass. Still, $40k is a hard swallow when the local Christian school will take your child for eleven. Worse, the number almost certainly fails to cover costs. Recall that guides start at $60k, rise to $100k on promotion, and the five “head guides” each earn $150k. At the five‑to‑one student‑to‑teacher ratio Alpha runs, those salaries alone suck in half the revenue from a twenty‑kid cohort before you’ve paid the rent, the head of school, the company executives, the curriculum designers, the engineers that are building the 2-hour platform and AlphaRead, the workshop costs (or the trip to Ukraine) or the marketing expenses (MacKenzie has a very well produced podcast, and I see a lot of ads for the school on Facebook now that we live locally). Compared with aristocratic one‑to‑one tutoring, forty grand is a steal. But $40,000 is still Lamborghini kindergarten – and even at those prices it is still burning through Joe Liemandt’s cash pile. Alpha’s answer to eventually solving the economics seems to be two fold: (1) Get enough scale that the fixed costs (like the learning platform) become a rounding error on overall costs, and (2) pull out the “non-essentials” at many of the campuses to get the marginal cost well below $10,000 per student. Whether they will be successful is still in early innings. The homeschool product beta is limping along with 1x learning, and the Arizona Charter doesn’t open until autumn 2025. Whether Alpha retains its magic without $150,000/year guides with 5:1 teacher:student ratios and generous bribe incentives programs, remains to be seen. The Weirdness Problem When Bryan Caplan writes about the signaling theory of education, he lists three signals that schools send to employers: Our students are smart
Inline links: He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness”, Laszlo Polgár, Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here, post 1, post 2, post 3, Scott’s response, Benjamin Bloom
Arizona Supreme Court1 mentions across 1 issues

Arizona Supreme Court is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "former Arizona Supreme Court judge". It most often appears alongside Alaska, America, Amisulpride.

Reference entry
Arizona Supreme Court
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 14, 2021
Last seen
April 14, 2021
Outbound links
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Source context
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
I don’t envy the PAC if they have adjudicate disputes involving, say, a doctor who has chosen to be regulated by the medical code of Norway suing her office building regulated by the laws of Houston, Texas. But they’re trying to rise to the occasion: their arbiters include a former Arizona Supreme Court judge, the head of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, and “the first Chilean lawyer to obtain permission from the Berlin Bar Association to act as a legal advisor in Chilean law in Germany”, which I guess sounds like the level of convolutedness you would need to be experienced in to make this work.
Inline links: their arbiters
Arks Advertising Agency1 mentions across 1 issues

Arks Advertising Agency is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 22, 2025
Last seen
April 22, 2025
Outbound links
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Source context
Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, and nominate them to cover this one too. 17: Wikipedia on the beginning of the Horslips, one of Ireland’s most famous rock bands: Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Charles O'Connor met when they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin. They were cajoled into pretending to be a band for a Harp Lager commercial but needed a keyboard player. Devlin said he knew a Jim Lockhart who would fit the bill. The four enjoyed the act so much that they decided to try being proper rock performers. 18: I complained that Elon Musk’s idea of “truth-seeking AI” was bad for alignment, and I still think this is true in the very long run. But I can’t deny it’s an inspired / providential choice for the current moment, already paying dividends (X): 19: Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, and Against Lyman Stone are some of this month’s top anti-Lyman-Stone content. 20: New polling on the Middle Ages: 21: More new-ish AI policy substacks potentially worth your time: You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide. I especially appreciated Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse.
Inline links: Trump Tower, Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, the beginning of the Horslips, bad for alignment, already paying dividends (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nPJW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad66b2c0-0180-4fc1-afc1-25de0f0ce40f_533x518.png, Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, Against Lyman Stone, New polling on the Middle Ages, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9b_4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3163eca-eaf4-492a-ac68-eadefa169be2_632x419.png, Rising Tide, Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse
Armagnac1 mentions across 1 issues

Armagnac is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English"; "elements of the Armagnac government deliberately prepping her". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Armagnac
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
Charles the Mad played no particular role in the Anglo-French treaty that resulted. The key figures were Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy but to press his great-grandfather’s claim to the French throne; Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had a blood feud to pursue; and Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, a ruthless and ambitious woman who probably deserved better than she got from history; she'd done a fine job playing the political game and trying to keep her family alive during the Armagnac-Burgundian Feud, but by this point she was all out of cards. The treaty said that Henry V would wed Charles's daughter, that Isabeau of Bavaria would swear that the Dauphin24 Charles (an Armagnac) was no son of the king's but the product of an incestuous25 affair between her and Louis of Orleans, and since that meant they were all out of male descendants of Charles the Mad, why, Henry would serve as regent for him and inherit through his own wife when he died.
Inline links: 24, 25
At that point the dominoes fell fast. The Armagnacs, under the (exceedingly poor) leadership of the Dauphin Charles and his (exceedingly inept) advisors, now the rump state of France, tried to fight multiple times; they called on Scotland for aid and got it and called on Castille and didn't.26 Every time they tried to fight they were beaten and Henry (now "The Conqueror") rolled down France, taking castles one by one and installing loyal members of the Burgundian party - now the collaborators' party - as governors. It looked as though the Hundred Years' War would soon be over.
Inline links: 26
Armagnac camp1 mentions across 1 issues

Armagnac camp is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "recognized at an early age by someone in the Armagnac camp as super-capable". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Armagnac camp
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
The voices told her that she should be good and remember to always go to church and obey her parents, which I understand is not exactly the default thing for hallucinations to tell you to do, though they are, of course, culture-dependent. She reported they were angels, that they came with a great light, that they came from the direction of the church, and that they were often accompanied by a sweet (or good) smell. She had not had a very eventful life and no one particularly noticed; her father had bad dreams that she'd go run off and join the army, which can be put down to the perfectly normal worries of a father for his daughter, considering the men-at-arms; her family were partisans of the Armagnac faction, so far as we can tell on the grounds that they weren't collaborators, and she mostly spent her time helping her mother in the house.
It's not wholly clear why de Baudricourt did this. The state of affairs of the Armagnac faction was certainly desperate, and yes, there were rumors that "it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virgin from the Lorraine marches"35 but really when you think about it, what are the odds it's this virgin? How does he even know she is a virgin? Even in the middle ages they knew most prophecies were fake, because you could go around just claiming anything you felt like was a prophecy. Maybe it's just charisma? That might explain what happened next, which is that the knight who took her had planned on raping her along the way, just on general principles,36 but somehow he... couldn't do it:
Inline links: 35, 36
Armagnac faction1 mentions across 1 issues

Armagnac faction is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the state of affairs of the Armagnac faction was certainly desperate". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Armagnac faction
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
The voices told her that she should be good and remember to always go to church and obey her parents, which I understand is not exactly the default thing for hallucinations to tell you to do, though they are, of course, culture-dependent. She reported they were angels, that they came with a great light, that they came from the direction of the church, and that they were often accompanied by a sweet (or good) smell. She had not had a very eventful life and no one particularly noticed; her father had bad dreams that she'd go run off and join the army, which can be put down to the perfectly normal worries of a father for his daughter, considering the men-at-arms; her family were partisans of the Armagnac faction, so far as we can tell on the grounds that they weren't collaborators, and she mostly spent her time helping her mother in the house.
It's not wholly clear why de Baudricourt did this. The state of affairs of the Armagnac faction was certainly desperate, and yes, there were rumors that "it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virgin from the Lorraine marches"35 but really when you think about it, what are the odds it's this virgin? How does he even know she is a virgin? Even in the middle ages they knew most prophecies were fake, because you could go around just claiming anything you felt like was a prophecy. Maybe it's just charisma? That might explain what happened next, which is that the knight who took her had planned on raping her along the way, just on general principles,36 but somehow he... couldn't do it:
Inline links: 35, 36
Armagnacs1 mentions across 1 issues

Armagnacs is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the chiefs of the Armagnac faction"; "The Armagnacs, under the leadership of Dauphin Charles"; "The Armagnacs are crooks". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Armagnacs
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 01, 2025
Last seen
August 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
At that point the dominoes fell fast. The Armagnacs, under the (exceedingly poor) leadership of the Dauphin Charles and his (exceedingly inept) advisors, now the rump state of France, tried to fight multiple times; they called on Scotland for aid and got it and called on Castille and didn't.26 Every time they tried to fight they were beaten and Henry (now "The Conqueror") rolled down France, taking castles one by one and installing loyal members of the Burgundian party - now the collaborators' party - as governors. It looked as though the Hundred Years' War would soon be over.
Inline links: 26
Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to take it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings,27 and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the goddams, respecters of no property and of no religion,28 not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.
Inline links: 27, 28
Armenians at Harvard1 mentions across 1 issues

Armenians at Harvard is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 25, 2025 and September 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the ones getting the fat checks from the Armenians at Harvard and the Department of Energy". It most often appears alongside barberpole model of fashion, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, Bay Area.

Reference entry
Armenians at Harvard
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 25, 2025
Last seen
September 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
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…”
Armour Institute1 mentions across 1 issues

Armour Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 04, 2024 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "He was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

Reference entry
Armour Institute
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 04, 2024
Last seen
December 04, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
[He] was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago. And not just dean; master builder also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all, as the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute of Technology. Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come almost to a halt in the United States - for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career - o white gods! Such prostration! Such acts of homage!
Army Of Public Works1 mentions across 1 issues

Army Of Public Works is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 20, 2021 and February 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "President Hammond goes before Congress, asking for $4 billion to create his new Army Of Public Works". It most often appears alongside Archangel Gabriel, Bonus Army, Congress.

Reference entry
Army Of Public Works
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 20, 2021
Last seen
February 20, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Movie Review: Gabriel Over The White House
February 20, 2021 · Original source
The next day, President Hammond goes before Congress, asking for $4 billion to create his new Army Of Public Works. But his rich friends and advisors have gotten there first, and proposed impeachment: the President has clearly gone mad. Congress is pretty on board, because they're all scared of anybody less rich and corrupt than they are. But Hammond comes in, gives a stirring speech on American history and George Washington and so on, and...nope, Congress still wants impeachment. So President Hammond suggests that they “read the Constitution”, which states that the President can declare martial law. Congress is aghast - this is a violation of democratic principles! But (asks Hammond) is it really? Isn't it even more of a violation of democratic principles that the President - a good man, a man elected by the people to fight for their rights - can be stymied by a bunch of corrupt rich people who don't care about the people at all? Isn't that the real violation of the Constitution going on here? Makes you think!
Arnold Ventures1 mentions across 1 issues

Arnold Ventures is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Buck was VP of Research at Arnold Ventures". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot initiative, @GoodSciProject.

Reference entry
Arnold Ventures
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 28, 2021
Last seen
December 28, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Stuart Buck, $50,000, to help launch the Good Science Project, “a science policy think tank that will focus on essays, blog posts, videos, and other public advocacy about how to improve science funding in the US.” Buck was VP of Research at Arnold Ventures, helped start the Center for Open Science, and has lectured at DARPA and IARPA and written pieces for Science and Nature. You can read more about his philosophy of science funding here or follow @GoodSciProject for updates.
Inline links: here, @GoodSciProject
ARPA1 mentions across 1 issues

ARPA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ARC received funding from ... ARPA". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

Reference entry
ARPA
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 19, 2025
Last seen
September 19, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
After his Framework was published in 1962, under the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center to make, in essence, some version of the Memex a reality. The ARC received funding from NASA and ARPA, and after six years, Engelbart released his oN-Line System (NLS). It was a revelation.
compilable "Command Meta Language" Live on stage, in the year 1968, Engelbart started up the NLS, opened a document, and typed some words into it. The words, he said, constituted a statement. And statements made up a file. Engelbart copied, manipulated, saved, and loaded his words and statements and files, zipping around with his newly-invented mouse. He demonstrated his ability to embed documents in one another—images with links to statements, words nested and categorized by one another, files filled with metadata. And then he paused, and the screen went blank. He explained that he and his colleagues at the ARC had been using this system to do their daily work for the last six months. He mentioned that they had, now, six consoles up and running. He showed the crowd a real document, then navigated to a statement within it. “This presentation is devoted to the AHIRC.” “What is the AHIRC?” he asked. Engelbart “froze” the initial statement, clicked on the acronym, and below the words “Augmented-Human-Intellect Research Center” appeared. He kept clicking and freezing, and a trail of nested and related information appeared—a list of funders, a graph of staffing over time, a mission statement. This was hypermedia. These were hyperlinks, he explained. NLS was a hypertext system. The presentation went on for 90 minutes longer, and became known as The Mother of All Demos.2 At around the 75-minute mark, Engelbart shows that two different NLS users could edit a single document simultaneously. While this was extremely impressive functionality, it was achieved with time-sharing—computation was done on a single machine, switching rapidly between tasks—and became infeasible the very next year, when ARPANET was released and the number of machines you could connect to one system grew rapidly. Engelbart’s hypertext system was impressive in its own right, even without collaborativity. And still, little came of it—Andy van Dam, an attendee and revolutionary computer scientist himself, would reflect decades later: “Everybody was blown away … and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact.” Engelbart’s ideas were just a little too out there. ARC quickly faded into obscurity. In 1972, Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training. EST, or “est” as it was marketed, offered a 60-hour self-improvement course for tech entrepreneurs modeled loosely on Zen Buddhism. Critics suggested that the est course was a mind-control method aimed at raising an authoritarian army. It was quite credibly branded a cult. The founder of est, Werner Erhard, was accused of tax fraud (he fought the claims and won $200,000 from the IRS) and incest (by his daughter, who later recanted). Engelbart served, for many years, on est’s board of directors. His researchers all left for greener, less cult-y pastures, and ARC died with hardly a whimper. No one really wanted to associate with Engelbart. His crackpot theories about an internet modeled after the memex fell into disrepute, and, if he was remembered at all, it was for the invention of the mouse. No one cared anymore about the memex, or hypertext. 3. Hyper-dreams of Hyper-everything Well, one man cared. Ted Nelson was born in 1937 to two twenty-year-olds, Ralph Nelson and Celeste Holm. His parents divorced in 1939, leaving him to be raised by his grandparents. Both Nelson (the elder) and Holm would go on to extremely-successful film careers: the former became an Emmy-winning director; the latter an Oscar-winning actress. And, at first, Ted seemed to be following in their footsteps. As a philosophy major at Swarthmore College, he produced a film called The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, which he described as “a short comedy about loneliness at college and the meaning of life.”3 Nelson also claims to have “[d]irected [and written] book and lyrics for what was apparently the first rock musical” in his junior year at Swarthmore. Thankfully, his interest in a career as an entertainer soon waned, and Nelson went off to study sociology in grad school—first at the University of Chicago, then at Harvard. Nelson took a computer class at Harvard, in 1960, and “[his] world exploded.”4 He realized the incredible power of computing, quickly intuited that these new machines could be generally applied to everything, and founded Project Xanadu.5 Initially, Xanadu’s scope was pretty limited. Word processors weren’t around yet, but Nelson wanted to build something strikingly similar: he wanted to write a program that could store and display documents, with version histories and edits all stored and displayed at the same time too. Later, Nelson would call this version-history feature “intercomparison.” (Strange coinages will be a… theme; I’m just trying to get you ready.) Nelson began working on an implementation, but his feature wishlist grew quickly, and he didn’t really know what he was doing, so in 1965, he sought help. He prepared a talk for the Association for Computing Machinery, and dropped, quite frankly, a bomb on the audience: The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. The original idea was to make a file for writers and scientists, much like the personal side of Bush's Memex, that would do the things such people need with the richness they would want. But there are so many possible specific functions that the mind reels. These uses and considerations become so complex that the only answer is a simple and generalized building-block structure, user-oriented and wholly general-purpose. The resulting file structure is explained and examples of its use are given. Ted Nelson was building the memex. Of course, he wasn’t a very technical guy, and so his talk mostly focused on the philosophy of Xanadu, not its implementation. He commented (emphasis mine): There are three false or inadequate theories of how writing is properly done. The first is that writing is a matter of inspiration. While inspiration is useful, it is rarely enough in itself. “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration,” is a common saying. But this leads us to the second false theory, that “writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Insofar as sitting facilitates work, this view seems reasonable, but it also suggests that what is done while sitting is a matter of comparative indifference; probably not. The third false theory is that all you really need is a good outline, created on prior consideration, and that if the outline is correctly followed the required text will be produced. For most good writers this theory is quite wrong. Rarely does the original outline predict well what headings and sequence will create the effects desired: the balance of emphasis, sequence of interrelating points, texture of insight, rhythm, etc. We may better call the outlining process inductive: certain interrelations appear to the author in the material itself, some at the outset and some as he works. He can only decide which to emphasize, which to use as unifying ideas and principles, and which to slight or delete, by trying. Outlines in general are spurious, made up after the fact by examining the segmentation of a finished work. If a finished work clearly follows an outline, that outline probably has been hammered out of many inspirations, comparisons and tests. Between the inspirations, then, and during the sitting, the task of writing is one of rearrangement and reprocessing, and the real outline develops slowly. The original crude or fragmentary texts created at the outset generally undergo many revision processes before they are finished. Intellectually they are pondered, juxtaposed, compared, adapted, transposed, and judged; mechanically they are copied, overwritten with revision markings, rearranged and copied again. This cycle may be repeated many times. The whole grows by trial and error in the processes of arrangement, comparison and retrenchment. Nelson recognized that the creation of knowledge is cyclical, recursive, self-referential. And he figured that our computer systems should accept and reflect that process: If a writer is really to be helped by an automated system, it ought to do more than retype and transpose: it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion, when his ideas are scraps, fragments, phrases, and contradictory overall designs. And it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid—making the fragments easy to find, and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing. How do you design such a system? To navigate intuitively within complex file systems, between document versions, and across source materials—to access all the scraps and fragments writers need to write—you would need to establish what Vannevar Bush called “tracks.” You would need to connect and save different ideas, linking them together. That was it—you needed links. Nelson went further, though—it wouldn’t do to simply have links to all the other files, a writer needed to see the other files before him, needed them to be brought up and displayed alongside his current work on demand. The links needed to contain their targets within themselves—so Nelson called them hyperlinks. And he called text embedded with hyperlinks hypertext, and movies embedded in his structure became hyperfilms, and so on. Nelson wanted us using computers to write and create self-referential, intricately-interconnected (“intertwingled,” as he’d later put it), eminently-accessible hypermedia. And recall, in 1965, state-of-the-art computing looked like this. Ted Nelson was thinking far, far ahead. Maybe too far ahead. Conference attendees were initially excited about his idea, but when he revealed himself to know very little about the technical task of building Xanadu—or even whether it was possible at all—interest evaporated. 4. Failing to Develop Xanadu But Nelson was all in. He would later write, “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” Nelson loved knowledge and connection and abstraction—mere technical details wouldn’t stop him from building the best possible computer system for producing and consuming information. He met Doug Engelbart in the mid 60s, forming a friendship with the only other man taking hypertext seriously at the time, and hopped around unhappily between various academic and scientific appointments. At one point, he and Andy van Dam worked together and produced the Hypertext Editing System—released in 1967, just before Engelbart’s NLS. It was the first computer application to ever have an “undo” button—Nelson claims to this day that he invented it (and the “back” button). Shortly thereafter, Nelson’s wife left him. In his 2010 autobiography, he writes, “She, reasonably, wanted a Nice Life; women want that sort of thing.” They had a son, whom Nelson continued to visit regularly. “Debbie has been a friend and great support all these years,” Nelson adds. “[S]he believed in me.” Nelson gave a talk at Union Theological Seminary in 1968 that included this slide, which Nelson considers “the first depiction of what the personal computer turned out to be.” “About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: 2, would reflect, 3, claims, 4, 5, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wpPj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda43a667-c15b-4626-a0a7-480ad1144dce_1114x1070.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y2jg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96fdc6cc-8ead-4aef-9539-fa421e77c0f9_1600x1299.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
“About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
ARPANET1 mentions across 1 issues

ARPANET is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released"; "introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

Reference entry
ARPANET
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 19, 2025
Last seen
September 19, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
compilable "Command Meta Language" Live on stage, in the year 1968, Engelbart started up the NLS, opened a document, and typed some words into it. The words, he said, constituted a statement. And statements made up a file. Engelbart copied, manipulated, saved, and loaded his words and statements and files, zipping around with his newly-invented mouse. He demonstrated his ability to embed documents in one another—images with links to statements, words nested and categorized by one another, files filled with metadata. And then he paused, and the screen went blank. He explained that he and his colleagues at the ARC had been using this system to do their daily work for the last six months. He mentioned that they had, now, six consoles up and running. He showed the crowd a real document, then navigated to a statement within it. “This presentation is devoted to the AHIRC.” “What is the AHIRC?” he asked. Engelbart “froze” the initial statement, clicked on the acronym, and below the words “Augmented-Human-Intellect Research Center” appeared. He kept clicking and freezing, and a trail of nested and related information appeared—a list of funders, a graph of staffing over time, a mission statement. This was hypermedia. These were hyperlinks, he explained. NLS was a hypertext system. The presentation went on for 90 minutes longer, and became known as The Mother of All Demos.2 At around the 75-minute mark, Engelbart shows that two different NLS users could edit a single document simultaneously. While this was extremely impressive functionality, it was achieved with time-sharing—computation was done on a single machine, switching rapidly between tasks—and became infeasible the very next year, when ARPANET was released and the number of machines you could connect to one system grew rapidly. Engelbart’s hypertext system was impressive in its own right, even without collaborativity. And still, little came of it—Andy van Dam, an attendee and revolutionary computer scientist himself, would reflect decades later: “Everybody was blown away … and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact.” Engelbart’s ideas were just a little too out there. ARC quickly faded into obscurity. In 1972, Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training. EST, or “est” as it was marketed, offered a 60-hour self-improvement course for tech entrepreneurs modeled loosely on Zen Buddhism. Critics suggested that the est course was a mind-control method aimed at raising an authoritarian army. It was quite credibly branded a cult. The founder of est, Werner Erhard, was accused of tax fraud (he fought the claims and won $200,000 from the IRS) and incest (by his daughter, who later recanted). Engelbart served, for many years, on est’s board of directors. His researchers all left for greener, less cult-y pastures, and ARC died with hardly a whimper. No one really wanted to associate with Engelbart. His crackpot theories about an internet modeled after the memex fell into disrepute, and, if he was remembered at all, it was for the invention of the mouse. No one cared anymore about the memex, or hypertext. 3. Hyper-dreams of Hyper-everything Well, one man cared. Ted Nelson was born in 1937 to two twenty-year-olds, Ralph Nelson and Celeste Holm. His parents divorced in 1939, leaving him to be raised by his grandparents. Both Nelson (the elder) and Holm would go on to extremely-successful film careers: the former became an Emmy-winning director; the latter an Oscar-winning actress. And, at first, Ted seemed to be following in their footsteps. As a philosophy major at Swarthmore College, he produced a film called The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, which he described as “a short comedy about loneliness at college and the meaning of life.”3 Nelson also claims to have “[d]irected [and written] book and lyrics for what was apparently the first rock musical” in his junior year at Swarthmore. Thankfully, his interest in a career as an entertainer soon waned, and Nelson went off to study sociology in grad school—first at the University of Chicago, then at Harvard. Nelson took a computer class at Harvard, in 1960, and “[his] world exploded.”4 He realized the incredible power of computing, quickly intuited that these new machines could be generally applied to everything, and founded Project Xanadu.5 Initially, Xanadu’s scope was pretty limited. Word processors weren’t around yet, but Nelson wanted to build something strikingly similar: he wanted to write a program that could store and display documents, with version histories and edits all stored and displayed at the same time too. Later, Nelson would call this version-history feature “intercomparison.” (Strange coinages will be a… theme; I’m just trying to get you ready.) Nelson began working on an implementation, but his feature wishlist grew quickly, and he didn’t really know what he was doing, so in 1965, he sought help. He prepared a talk for the Association for Computing Machinery, and dropped, quite frankly, a bomb on the audience: The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. The original idea was to make a file for writers and scientists, much like the personal side of Bush's Memex, that would do the things such people need with the richness they would want. But there are so many possible specific functions that the mind reels. These uses and considerations become so complex that the only answer is a simple and generalized building-block structure, user-oriented and wholly general-purpose. The resulting file structure is explained and examples of its use are given. Ted Nelson was building the memex. Of course, he wasn’t a very technical guy, and so his talk mostly focused on the philosophy of Xanadu, not its implementation. He commented (emphasis mine): There are three false or inadequate theories of how writing is properly done. The first is that writing is a matter of inspiration. While inspiration is useful, it is rarely enough in itself. “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration,” is a common saying. But this leads us to the second false theory, that “writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Insofar as sitting facilitates work, this view seems reasonable, but it also suggests that what is done while sitting is a matter of comparative indifference; probably not. The third false theory is that all you really need is a good outline, created on prior consideration, and that if the outline is correctly followed the required text will be produced. For most good writers this theory is quite wrong. Rarely does the original outline predict well what headings and sequence will create the effects desired: the balance of emphasis, sequence of interrelating points, texture of insight, rhythm, etc. We may better call the outlining process inductive: certain interrelations appear to the author in the material itself, some at the outset and some as he works. He can only decide which to emphasize, which to use as unifying ideas and principles, and which to slight or delete, by trying. Outlines in general are spurious, made up after the fact by examining the segmentation of a finished work. If a finished work clearly follows an outline, that outline probably has been hammered out of many inspirations, comparisons and tests. Between the inspirations, then, and during the sitting, the task of writing is one of rearrangement and reprocessing, and the real outline develops slowly. The original crude or fragmentary texts created at the outset generally undergo many revision processes before they are finished. Intellectually they are pondered, juxtaposed, compared, adapted, transposed, and judged; mechanically they are copied, overwritten with revision markings, rearranged and copied again. This cycle may be repeated many times. The whole grows by trial and error in the processes of arrangement, comparison and retrenchment. Nelson recognized that the creation of knowledge is cyclical, recursive, self-referential. And he figured that our computer systems should accept and reflect that process: If a writer is really to be helped by an automated system, it ought to do more than retype and transpose: it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion, when his ideas are scraps, fragments, phrases, and contradictory overall designs. And it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid—making the fragments easy to find, and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing. How do you design such a system? To navigate intuitively within complex file systems, between document versions, and across source materials—to access all the scraps and fragments writers need to write—you would need to establish what Vannevar Bush called “tracks.” You would need to connect and save different ideas, linking them together. That was it—you needed links. Nelson went further, though—it wouldn’t do to simply have links to all the other files, a writer needed to see the other files before him, needed them to be brought up and displayed alongside his current work on demand. The links needed to contain their targets within themselves—so Nelson called them hyperlinks. And he called text embedded with hyperlinks hypertext, and movies embedded in his structure became hyperfilms, and so on. Nelson wanted us using computers to write and create self-referential, intricately-interconnected (“intertwingled,” as he’d later put it), eminently-accessible hypermedia. And recall, in 1965, state-of-the-art computing looked like this. Ted Nelson was thinking far, far ahead. Maybe too far ahead. Conference attendees were initially excited about his idea, but when he revealed himself to know very little about the technical task of building Xanadu—or even whether it was possible at all—interest evaporated. 4. Failing to Develop Xanadu But Nelson was all in. He would later write, “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” Nelson loved knowledge and connection and abstraction—mere technical details wouldn’t stop him from building the best possible computer system for producing and consuming information. He met Doug Engelbart in the mid 60s, forming a friendship with the only other man taking hypertext seriously at the time, and hopped around unhappily between various academic and scientific appointments. At one point, he and Andy van Dam worked together and produced the Hypertext Editing System—released in 1967, just before Engelbart’s NLS. It was the first computer application to ever have an “undo” button—Nelson claims to this day that he invented it (and the “back” button). Shortly thereafter, Nelson’s wife left him. In his 2010 autobiography, he writes, “She, reasonably, wanted a Nice Life; women want that sort of thing.” They had a son, whom Nelson continued to visit regularly. “Debbie has been a friend and great support all these years,” Nelson adds. “[S]he believed in me.” Nelson gave a talk at Union Theological Seminary in 1968 that included this slide, which Nelson considers “the first depiction of what the personal computer turned out to be.” “About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: 2, would reflect, 3, claims, 4, 5, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wpPj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda43a667-c15b-4626-a0a7-480ad1144dce_1114x1070.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y2jg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96fdc6cc-8ead-4aef-9539-fa421e77c0f9_1600x1299.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
“About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
ArrangedMarriages.co1 mentions across 1 issues

ArrangedMarriages.co is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 20, 2021 and September 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "ArrangedMarriages.co is a site by some trad Twitter people". It most often appears alongside 4chan, A Clockwork Orange, Adrenochrome.

Reference entry
ArrangedMarriages.co
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 20, 2021
Last seen
September 20, 2021
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Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
8: ArrangedMarriages.co is a site by some trad Twitter people who offer to arrange a marriage for you. They claim to have already completed one pairing. I cannot get any more information about how they work, let me know if you have some.
Inline links: ArrangedMarriages.co, already completed
Arson & Burglary team1 mentions across 1 issues

Arson & Burglary team is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 13, 2026 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I work on the Arson & Burglary team". It most often appears alongside Adeline, Aella Simposium, Altman.

Reference entry
Arson & Burglary team
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 13, 2026
Last seen
January 13, 2026
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SOTA On Bay Area House Party
January 13, 2026 · Original source
...either. “Yeah,” you say. “I guess it would be awkward to use Claude at OpenAI.” “Nah,” he says, “The only reason I don’t use it is because I’m not a coder. I work on the Arson & Burglary team.” “I didn’t know OpenAI had an Arson & Burglary Team.” “It’s pretty new. In June, a court ruled that adding books to AI training data only counts as fair use if you dest...
...to use Claude at OpenAI.” “Nah,” he says, “The only reason I don’t use it is because I’m not a coder. I work on the Arson & Burglary team.” “I didn’t know OpenAI had an Arson & Burglary Team.” “It’s pretty new. In June, a court ruled that adding books to AI training data only counts as fair use if you destroy the original copy . But sometimes this is tough....
...ned the trend either. “Yeah,” you say. “I guess it would be awkward to use Claude at OpenAI.” “Nah,” he says, “The only reason I don’t use it is because I’m not a coder. I work on the Arson & Burglary team.” “I didn’t know OpenAI had an Arson & Burglary Team.” “It’s pretty new. In June, a court ruled that adding books to AI training data only counts as fair use if you dest...
Artbreeder AI1 mentions across 1 issues

Artbreeder AI is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 13, 2022 and April 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ask the Artbreeder AI to make Xi Jinping’s face look like a white person". It most often appears alongside 16th Central Committee, Alaska, Aristotle.

Reference entry
Artbreeder AI
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 13, 2022
Last seen
April 13, 2022
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Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
April 13, 2022 · Original source
PS: The picture on the top is what happens if you ask the Artbreeder AI to make Xi Jinping’s face look like a white person. I think it’s pretty good!
Inline links: Artbreeder
arXiv1 mentions across 1 issues

arXiv is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 20, 2022 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "preprint server like arXiv". It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Alexander Macmillan, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Reference entry
arXiv
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 20, 2022
Last seen
May 20, 2022
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Your Book Review: Making Nature
May 20, 2022 · Original source
The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.
There’s no question that the web has profoundly changed the way scientists interact with scientific results. But interestingly, the instantaneousness of online publication — whether on blogs, in the comments below an article, in social media, or on a preprint server like arXiv and bioRxiv — hasn’t affected Nature very much. We might have naïvely expected that it would have tried to keep up with the new platforms, since speed was its comparative advantage. But it didn’t. And that hasn’t made it obsolete, either.
Inline links: arXiv, bioRxiv
Ascent1 mentions across 1 issues

Ascent is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 29, 2024 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word". It most often appears alongside @ElytraMithra, Aaron, ACX.

Reference entry
Ascent
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 29, 2024
Last seen
May 29, 2024
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Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
36: Alex Tabarrok and New York magazine explain the Adderall shortage. Summary: the DEA, in its crusade against opioids, has put such strict standards on medication factories that many have gotten shut down for “trivial infractions” (for example, “orders struck from 222s must be crossed out with a line and the word cancel written next to them. Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word”). In this case, the FDA is the good guys trying to get the factories to re-open again, but so far the DEA hasn’t budged.
Inline links: explain the Adderall shortage
ASEAN1 mentions across 1 issues

ASEAN is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)"; "ASEAN is engaged in signing free trade agreements". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, Asia.

Reference entry
ASEAN
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 28, 2021
Last seen
June 28, 2021
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Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
South-east Asia (like India) is a region in which serious land reform is off the political agenda, even if the farce that is the Philippine reform programme continues. Given this, can the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand do anything else to improve their economic performance? Most obviously they could make the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) work as a vehicle for effective industrial policy. There is no reason why the four core economies of ASEAN (and indeed Vietnam, the important economy omitted from this book) could not run an effective manufacturing infant industry policy in what is a market of 500 million people. But there is no sign of this happening. Rather than raising barriers and promoting exports to nurture local manufacturing enterprise, ASEAN is engaged in signing free trade agreements with industrially more developed states, including China. There is very little cohesion, or substantive dialogue, between the political leaders of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. And the considerable influence of the offshore financial centre of Singapore in ASEAN is developmentally deeply unhelpful. It is as if Switzerland or Monaco had been granted a seat at the table when post-war European industrial policy was being planned in the 1950s. South-east Asia remains a beacon for what not to do if you want economic transformation. Allow landlordism and scale farming despite the presence of vast numbers of underemployed peasants capable of growing more. Do not worry too much about export-oriented manufacturing, which can happily be undertaken by multinational enterprises. Leave entrepreneurs to their own devices. And proceed quickly to deregulated banking, stock markets and international capital flows, the true symbols of a modern state. That is how its politicians constructed the south-east Asian region’s relative failure.
Asian American Students Alliance1 mentions across 1 issues

Asian American Students Alliance is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 01, 2024 and May 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Asian American Students Alliance (Yale)"". It most often appears alongside #MeToo, #StopAAPIHate, #StopAAPIHate.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 01, 2024
Last seen
May 01, 2024
Outbound links
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Source context
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When Everything Everywhere All At Once came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
Asian American Students Association1 mentions across 1 issues

Asian American Students Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 01, 2024 and May 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Asian American Students Association (Princeton)"". It most often appears alongside #MeToo, #StopAAPIHate, #StopAAPIHate.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 01, 2024
Last seen
May 01, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When Everything Everywhere All At Once came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
Asian Community Center1 mentions across 1 issues

Asian Community Center is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 09, 2023 and March 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "dozens of organizations with names like the ... Asian Community Center". It most often appears alongside Asians For Biden, Bernie, Black.

Reference entry
Asian Community Center
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 09, 2023
Last seen
March 09, 2023
Outbound links
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Source context
Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
March 09, 2023 · Original source
This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’” every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.
Asian News International1 mentions across 1 issues

Asian News International is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 01, 2024 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Asian News International is an Indian news organization". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 01, 2024
Last seen
November 01, 2024
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Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
Asian News International is an Indian news organization. Its Wikipedia page stated it had a history of being a propaganda outlet for the regime. ANI sued Wikipedia, and as the case continues, the judge has ordered Wikipedia to take down its article on ANI. You can read the archived version here.
Inline links: here
Asian Student Association1 mentions across 1 issues

Asian Student Association is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 01, 2024 and May 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Asian Student Association (Harvard)"". It most often appears alongside #MeToo, #StopAAPIHate, #StopAAPIHate.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 01, 2024
Last seen
May 01, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When Everything Everywhere All At Once came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
Asians For Biden1 mentions across 1 issues

Asians For Biden is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 09, 2023 and March 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "dozens of organizations with names like ... Asians For Biden". It most often appears alongside Asian Community Center, Bernie, Black.

Reference entry
Asians For Biden
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 09, 2023
Last seen
March 09, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
March 09, 2023 · Original source
This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’” every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.
Asimov Press1 mentions across 1 issues

Asimov Press is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 29, 2024 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Asimov Press: Scaling Phage Therapy". It most often appears alongside @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot, @JackTindale.

Reference entry
Asimov Press
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 29, 2024
Last seen
February 29, 2024
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Source context
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
33: Asimov Press: Scaling Phage Therapy. One of this year’s ACX Grants went to a phage research group, and I mentioned the contrast between the years of research on phages with generally good results and the limited clinical applications. This piece tells more of the story: bacteriophages do work, but they’re usually hyperspecialized to specific strains of bacteria, and it’s hard to keep a giant library of thousands of phage types around and then match whatever bacterium your patient has to the right phage. Still, people are working on it and the tech is gradually advancing.
Inline links: Scaling Phage Therapy
askaforecaster.com1 mentions across 1 issues

askaforecaster.com is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2025 and July 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "has launched askaforecaster.com". It most often appears alongside Afrobarometer, AGI, AI 2027.

Reference entry
askaforecaster.com
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2025
Last seen
July 01, 2025
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Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
32: Superforecaster Nuno Sempere (maybe with the rest of the Samotsvety team?) has launched askaforecaster.com. You can get a “quick take” for $20, a “thoughtful response” for $150, or an “in-depth look” for $1000.
Inline links: askaforecaster.com
AskReddit1 mentions across 1 issues

AskReddit is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 17, 2025 and January 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "AskReddit gives their favorite historical facts". It most often appears alongside @tamaybes, @venturetwins, A16Z.

Reference entry
AskReddit
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 17, 2025
Last seen
January 17, 2025
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Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
36: AskReddit gives their favorite historical facts:
Inline links: gives
Some speculation here.
Inline links: here
ASMBS1 mentions across 1 issues

ASMBS is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 30, 2022 and November 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "IFSO and the ASMBS, the two largest bariatric surgical associations in the world". It most often appears alongside Adam, AMG-133, amoxicillin suspension.

Reference entry
ASMBS
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 30, 2022
Last seen
November 30, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Semaglutide
November 30, 2022 · Original source
IFSO and the ASMBS, the two largest bariatric surgical associations in the world, recently updated their guideline recommendations for the first time in 30 years. They are now recommending that all patients with a BMI of 35 (except for the occasional weight lifter) should consider bariatric surgery as well as all diabetics with a BMI of 30 (about 90% of diabetics) and that surgery can even be considered in selected patients with no co-morbidities.
Asociación Benéfica PRISMA1 mentions across 1 issues

Asociación Benéfica PRISMA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "conducted in the Peruvian Amazon by the Peruvian nonprofit Asociación Benéfica PRISMA". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
Outbound links
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Source context
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Trichuris trichiura - Funded by NIH and conducted in the Peruvian Amazon by the Peruvian nonprofit Asociación Benéfica PRISMA, this field trial is the first clinical study of oxfendazole’s efficacy in human patients. This clinical trial has been live since the fall of 2024. ODG is a collaborator in this study and will have full access to the study results to support the development of oxfendazole. (NCT04713787)
ASPEN1 mentions across 1 issues

ASPEN is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "a variety of funding sources including ASPEN". It most often appears alongside American College of Clinical Pharmacy, BCH, Boston Children’s Hospital.

Reference entry
ASPEN
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 06, 2021
Last seen
August 06, 2021
Outbound links
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Source context
Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
August 06, 2021 · Original source
We wrote almost 20 different grant proposals to a variety of funding sources including ASPEN, American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and the Gerber Foundation. The response was always the same…. “Everyone knows it's not the lipids.” Even Fresenius, who held the rights to Omegaven, was not interested in sponsoring our research. One rejection letter from a pharmacy organization noted that I wasn't qualified to do translational research, Dr Folkman (the father of angiogenesis) was not a suitable mentor, and Harvard was not the proper place to train a pharmacist in scientific research!
Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity1 mentions across 1 issues

Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2024 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity". It most often appears alongside affirmative action, Africa, African National Congress.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 07, 2024
Last seen
May 07, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
When I first read the book, I had a hard time tracing Hanania's source for the "great view" and "walk-up" claims you quoted. As far as I can tell, it goes back to a 1995 memo by Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (pages 33 to 36, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf) that specifically gives these phrases as examples of information that "does not violate the Act". Sine then, they have consistently been cited as examples of acceptable language in various sources. Hanania's description might not be strictly false — maybe Achtenberg was referring to some earlier example where somebody cited those phrases as exclusionary — but it is definitely misleading.
Inline links: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf
Association for Computing Machinery1 mentions across 1 issues

Association for Computing Machinery is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "He prepared a talk for the Association for Computing Machinery". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 19, 2025
Last seen
September 19, 2025
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Issue trail
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
compilable "Command Meta Language" Live on stage, in the year 1968, Engelbart started up the NLS, opened a document, and typed some words into it. The words, he said, constituted a statement. And statements made up a file. Engelbart copied, manipulated, saved, and loaded his words and statements and files, zipping around with his newly-invented mouse. He demonstrated his ability to embed documents in one another—images with links to statements, words nested and categorized by one another, files filled with metadata. And then he paused, and the screen went blank. He explained that he and his colleagues at the ARC had been using this system to do their daily work for the last six months. He mentioned that they had, now, six consoles up and running. He showed the crowd a real document, then navigated to a statement within it. “This presentation is devoted to the AHIRC.” “What is the AHIRC?” he asked. Engelbart “froze” the initial statement, clicked on the acronym, and below the words “Augmented-Human-Intellect Research Center” appeared. He kept clicking and freezing, and a trail of nested and related information appeared—a list of funders, a graph of staffing over time, a mission statement. This was hypermedia. These were hyperlinks, he explained. NLS was a hypertext system. The presentation went on for 90 minutes longer, and became known as The Mother of All Demos.2 At around the 75-minute mark, Engelbart shows that two different NLS users could edit a single document simultaneously. While this was extremely impressive functionality, it was achieved with time-sharing—computation was done on a single machine, switching rapidly between tasks—and became infeasible the very next year, when ARPANET was released and the number of machines you could connect to one system grew rapidly. Engelbart’s hypertext system was impressive in its own right, even without collaborativity. And still, little came of it—Andy van Dam, an attendee and revolutionary computer scientist himself, would reflect decades later: “Everybody was blown away … and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact.” Engelbart’s ideas were just a little too out there. ARC quickly faded into obscurity. In 1972, Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training. EST, or “est” as it was marketed, offered a 60-hour self-improvement course for tech entrepreneurs modeled loosely on Zen Buddhism. Critics suggested that the est course was a mind-control method aimed at raising an authoritarian army. It was quite credibly branded a cult. The founder of est, Werner Erhard, was accused of tax fraud (he fought the claims and won $200,000 from the IRS) and incest (by his daughter, who later recanted). Engelbart served, for many years, on est’s board of directors. His researchers all left for greener, less cult-y pastures, and ARC died with hardly a whimper. No one really wanted to associate with Engelbart. His crackpot theories about an internet modeled after the memex fell into disrepute, and, if he was remembered at all, it was for the invention of the mouse. No one cared anymore about the memex, or hypertext. 3. Hyper-dreams of Hyper-everything Well, one man cared. Ted Nelson was born in 1937 to two twenty-year-olds, Ralph Nelson and Celeste Holm. His parents divorced in 1939, leaving him to be raised by his grandparents. Both Nelson (the elder) and Holm would go on to extremely-successful film careers: the former became an Emmy-winning director; the latter an Oscar-winning actress. And, at first, Ted seemed to be following in their footsteps. As a philosophy major at Swarthmore College, he produced a film called The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, which he described as “a short comedy about loneliness at college and the meaning of life.”3 Nelson also claims to have “[d]irected [and written] book and lyrics for what was apparently the first rock musical” in his junior year at Swarthmore. Thankfully, his interest in a career as an entertainer soon waned, and Nelson went off to study sociology in grad school—first at the University of Chicago, then at Harvard. Nelson took a computer class at Harvard, in 1960, and “[his] world exploded.”4 He realized the incredible power of computing, quickly intuited that these new machines could be generally applied to everything, and founded Project Xanadu.5 Initially, Xanadu’s scope was pretty limited. Word processors weren’t around yet, but Nelson wanted to build something strikingly similar: he wanted to write a program that could store and display documents, with version histories and edits all stored and displayed at the same time too. Later, Nelson would call this version-history feature “intercomparison.” (Strange coinages will be a… theme; I’m just trying to get you ready.) Nelson began working on an implementation, but his feature wishlist grew quickly, and he didn’t really know what he was doing, so in 1965, he sought help. He prepared a talk for the Association for Computing Machinery, and dropped, quite frankly, a bomb on the audience: The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. The original idea was to make a file for writers and scientists, much like the personal side of Bush's Memex, that would do the things such people need with the richness they would want. But there are so many possible specific functions that the mind reels. These uses and considerations become so complex that the only answer is a simple and generalized building-block structure, user-oriented and wholly general-purpose. The resulting file structure is explained and examples of its use are given. Ted Nelson was building the memex. Of course, he wasn’t a very technical guy, and so his talk mostly focused on the philosophy of Xanadu, not its implementation. He commented (emphasis mine): There are three false or inadequate theories of how writing is properly done. The first is that writing is a matter of inspiration. While inspiration is useful, it is rarely enough in itself. “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration,” is a common saying. But this leads us to the second false theory, that “writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Insofar as sitting facilitates work, this view seems reasonable, but it also suggests that what is done while sitting is a matter of comparative indifference; probably not. The third false theory is that all you really need is a good outline, created on prior consideration, and that if the outline is correctly followed the required text will be produced. For most good writers this theory is quite wrong. Rarely does the original outline predict well what headings and sequence will create the effects desired: the balance of emphasis, sequence of interrelating points, texture of insight, rhythm, etc. We may better call the outlining process inductive: certain interrelations appear to the author in the material itself, some at the outset and some as he works. He can only decide which to emphasize, which to use as unifying ideas and principles, and which to slight or delete, by trying. Outlines in general are spurious, made up after the fact by examining the segmentation of a finished work. If a finished work clearly follows an outline, that outline probably has been hammered out of many inspirations, comparisons and tests. Between the inspirations, then, and during the sitting, the task of writing is one of rearrangement and reprocessing, and the real outline develops slowly. The original crude or fragmentary texts created at the outset generally undergo many revision processes before they are finished. Intellectually they are pondered, juxtaposed, compared, adapted, transposed, and judged; mechanically they are copied, overwritten with revision markings, rearranged and copied again. This cycle may be repeated many times. The whole grows by trial and error in the processes of arrangement, comparison and retrenchment. Nelson recognized that the creation of knowledge is cyclical, recursive, self-referential. And he figured that our computer systems should accept and reflect that process: If a writer is really to be helped by an automated system, it ought to do more than retype and transpose: it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion, when his ideas are scraps, fragments, phrases, and contradictory overall designs. And it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid—making the fragments easy to find, and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing. How do you design such a system? To navigate intuitively within complex file systems, between document versions, and across source materials—to access all the scraps and fragments writers need to write—you would need to establish what Vannevar Bush called “tracks.” You would need to connect and save different ideas, linking them together. That was it—you needed links. Nelson went further, though—it wouldn’t do to simply have links to all the other files, a writer needed to see the other files before him, needed them to be brought up and displayed alongside his current work on demand. The links needed to contain their targets within themselves—so Nelson called them hyperlinks. And he called text embedded with hyperlinks hypertext, and movies embedded in his structure became hyperfilms, and so on. Nelson wanted us using computers to write and create self-referential, intricately-interconnected (“intertwingled,” as he’d later put it), eminently-accessible hypermedia. And recall, in 1965, state-of-the-art computing looked like this. Ted Nelson was thinking far, far ahead. Maybe too far ahead. Conference attendees were initially excited about his idea, but when he revealed himself to know very little about the technical task of building Xanadu—or even whether it was possible at all—interest evaporated. 4. Failing to Develop Xanadu But Nelson was all in. He would later write, “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” Nelson loved knowledge and connection and abstraction—mere technical details wouldn’t stop him from building the best possible computer system for producing and consuming information. He met Doug Engelbart in the mid 60s, forming a friendship with the only other man taking hypertext seriously at the time, and hopped around unhappily between various academic and scientific appointments. At one point, he and Andy van Dam worked together and produced the Hypertext Editing System—released in 1967, just before Engelbart’s NLS. It was the first computer application to ever have an “undo” button—Nelson claims to this day that he invented it (and the “back” button). Shortly thereafter, Nelson’s wife left him. In his 2010 autobiography, he writes, “She, reasonably, wanted a Nice Life; women want that sort of thing.” They had a son, whom Nelson continued to visit regularly. “Debbie has been a friend and great support all these years,” Nelson adds. “[S]he believed in me.” Nelson gave a talk at Union Theological Seminary in 1968 that included this slide, which Nelson considers “the first depiction of what the personal computer turned out to be.” “About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: 2, would reflect, 3, claims, 4, 5, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wpPj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda43a667-c15b-4626-a0a7-480ad1144dce_1114x1070.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y2jg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96fdc6cc-8ead-4aef-9539-fa421e77c0f9_1600x1299.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
Association of American Publishers1 mentions across 1 issues

Association of American Publishers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 08, 2021 and April 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Association of American Publishers tells us"; "The Association of American Publishers tells us that campus copyright violation is..."". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

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Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
The Association of American Publishers tells us that campus copyright violation is (Ellickson quotes) “widespread, flagrant, and egregious”. They seem to be right. Ellickson asked law professors directly, and almost all admit to doing it – though not for major portions of books. The managers of law school copy rooms don’t try to enforce the rules, they let the professors police themselves. Several commercial copy centres made multiple copies for him of an article from a professional journal. “I have overheard a staff member of a copy center tell a patron that copyright laws prevented him from photocopying more than 10 percent of a book presented as a hardcopy original; the patron then asked whether he himself could use the copy center’s equipment to accomplish that task and was told that he could.”16
Inline links: 16
Association Of German National Jews1 mentions across 1 issues

Association Of German National Jews is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 18, 2024 and January 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Association Of German National Jews , “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”". It most often appears alongside @april, @somefoundersalt, ACX.

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1
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1
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January 18, 2024
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January 18, 2024
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Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
29: The Association Of German National Jews, “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”, was a group of Jews who supported the Nazi Party. This didn’t make too much more sense at the time than it does now, although some well-assimilated German Jews did have the same negative attitudes towards recent poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants as ethnic Germans (my great-great-grandfather was one of the poor immigrants, and had awful things to say about his reception by native German Jews). The organization’s existence “gave rise to a contemporary joke about Naumann and his followers ending their meeting by giving the Nazi salute and shouting ‘Down With Us!’“ Yes, they were later sent to concentration camps.
Inline links: Association Of German National Jews
Association of Public Health Laboratories1 mentions across 1 issues

Association of Public Health Laboratories is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 05, 2021 and August 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "A group called the Association of Public Health Laboratories literally begged the FDA". It most often appears alongside ACT UP San Francisco, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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August 05, 2021
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August 05, 2021
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Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
A group called the Association of Public Health Laboratories literally begged the FDA to be allowed to deploy the COVID tests they had sitting on the shelf ready for use. The head of the APHL went to the head of the FDA and begged him, in what they described as “an extraordinary and rare request”, to be allowed to test for the coronavirus. The FDA head just wrote back saying that “false diagnostic test results can lead to significant adverse public health consequences”.
Inline links: literally begged
Association of Research Libraries1 mentions across 1 issues

Association of Research Libraries is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "As part of the uproar that followed the book’s publication, the Association of Research Libraries published an online anti-Baker FAQ". It most often appears alongside 1893, 1970s, 1980s.

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April 30, 2021
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April 30, 2021
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Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
As part of the uproar that followed the book’s publication, the Association of Research Libraries published an online anti-Baker FAQ, and in 2002, the book “Vandals in the Stacks?” by Richard J. Cox came out, presenting an attempted refutation of Baker’s theses. I have read both of these and discuss Cox’s arguments later on, but I must admit in advance that I was mostly convinced by Baker’s argumentation much more than by that of his opponents. Nonetheless, it is uncommon to have a polemical book receive a book-length response, and anyone interested in Baker’s thesis is advised to check out Cox as well.1
Inline links: anti-Baker FAQ, 1
Association of South-East Asian Nations1 mentions across 1 issues

Association of South-East Asian Nations is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "they could make the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) work". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

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1
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June 28, 2021
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June 28, 2021
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Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
South-east Asia (like India) is a region in which serious land reform is off the political agenda, even if the farce that is the Philippine reform programme continues. Given this, can the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand do anything else to improve their economic performance? Most obviously they could make the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) work as a vehicle for effective industrial policy. There is no reason why the four core economies of ASEAN (and indeed Vietnam, the important economy omitted from this book) could not run an effective manufacturing infant industry policy in what is a market of 500 million people. But there is no sign of this happening. Rather than raising barriers and promoting exports to nurture local manufacturing enterprise, ASEAN is engaged in signing free trade agreements with industrially more developed states, including China. There is very little cohesion, or substantive dialogue, between the political leaders of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. And the considerable influence of the offshore financial centre of Singapore in ASEAN is developmentally deeply unhelpful. It is as if Switzerland or Monaco had been granted a seat at the table when post-war European industrial policy was being planned in the 1950s. South-east Asia remains a beacon for what not to do if you want economic transformation. Allow landlordism and scale farming despite the presence of vast numbers of underemployed peasants capable of growing more. Do not worry too much about export-oriented manufacturing, which can happily be undertaken by multinational enterprises. Leave entrepreneurs to their own devices. And proceed quickly to deregulated banking, stock markets and international capital flows, the true symbols of a modern state. That is how its politicians constructed the south-east Asian region’s relative failure.
Astalcodexten1 mentions across 1 issues

Astalcodexten is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2022 and February 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "If the American way is a “government of laws, and not of men”, then the ACX way is a government of byzantine highly speculative institutions instead of men". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Against Malaria Foundation, Benjamin Todd.

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Astalcodexten
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1
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1
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February 09, 2022
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February 09, 2022
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So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
But I’m already scheming ways to try to capture the positive effects of a grants program without having to run one myself. If the American way is a “government of laws, and not of men”, then the ACX way is a government of byzantine highly speculative institutions instead of men. So I’m thinking about how to replace my role with a impact certificate-based retroactive public goods funding market, and working on talking to various interesting people who might be able to make this happen. Once I recover from the current grants round, I’ll push them harder and see if we can get a prototype by next fall.
Inline links: impact certificate, retroactive public goods funding market
Astral Codex Ten Montreal1 mentions across 1 issues

Astral Codex Ten Montreal is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Meetup.com group: https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-montreal/". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

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March 30, 2024
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March 30, 2024
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
...qSgGbF8x3mTcia ; Mailing list: http://eepurl.com/io5vZM ; Discord: https://discord.gg/K8gMNzqPVG ; Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/less.wrong.montreal/ ; Meetup.com group: https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-montreal/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8HEFDrXXm6EjGpDSM/acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024-montreal-qc OTTAWA, CANADA Contact: Tess Walsh Con...
Astralcodexten bulletin board1 mentions across 1 issues

Astralcodexten bulletin board is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 24, 2025 and March 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX has a bulletin board". It most often appears alongside Ammon Bartram, Astralcodexten, Astralcodexten Discord.

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March 24, 2025
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March 24, 2025
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Open Thread 374
March 24, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Astralcodexten Discord1 mentions across 1 issues

Astralcodexten Discord is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 24, 2025 and March 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX has an unofficial ... Discord". It most often appears alongside Ammon Bartram, Astralcodexten, Astralcodexten bulletin board.

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Astralcodexten Discord
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1
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March 24, 2025
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March 24, 2025
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Open Thread 374
March 24, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Astralcodexten subreddit1 mentions across 1 issues

Astralcodexten subreddit is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 24, 2025 and March 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX has an unofficial subreddit". It most often appears alongside Ammon Bartram, Astralcodexten, Astralcodexten bulletin board.

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1
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March 24, 2025
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March 24, 2025
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Open Thread 374
March 24, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: Tabula Bio (...
AT&T1 mentions across 1 issues

AT&T is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2023 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Bell Labs (AT&T) maintained a position of dominance for half a century". It most often appears alongside 2008 Financial Crisis, 2023 book review contest, 30-Year Mortgage.

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AT&T
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Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
...ent role due to inertia, whereas the ones who succeed long-term appear to prioritize their own learning and exploration. As a case study, Lebron discusses how Bell Labs (AT&T) maintained a position of dominance for half a century. He attributes this to four things: First, they hired the best. There was interaction between three groups that di...
...d engineers who conducted exploratory research. - More applied engineers, who took the work of the first group and integrated their discoveries into existing problems at AT&T. - A third group of engineers who put the work from the first two groups into production. This seems to have been cargo-culted at most modern tech companies. Ping-pong t...
...their current role due to inertia, whereas the ones who succeed long-term appear to prioritize their own learning and exploration. As a case study, Lebron discusses how Bell Labs (AT&T) maintained a position of dominance for half a century. He attributes this to four things: First, they hired the best. There was interaction between three groups that did not interact at most organizations. - Scientists and...
Athena Neurosciences1 mentions across 1 issues

Athena Neurosciences is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 11, 2025 and July 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company)"; "Athena Neurosciences, where Games and his colleagues worked". It most often appears alongside aducanumab, Alzheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Disease.

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Athena Neurosciences
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1
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1
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July 11, 2025
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July 11, 2025
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Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
July 11, 2025 · Original source
In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.
Within a year, Athena Neurosciences, where Games and his colleagues worked, was acquired by Elan Corp. for $638 million. In the press release, Elan declared the acquisition “an opportunity to capitalize on an important therapeutic niche,” combining Athena’s “leading Alzheimer’s program” with Elan’s drug development pipeline. The PDAPP mouse had transformed from laboratory marvel to the cornerstone of a billion-dollar strategy. The industry followed. Pharmaceutical giants, biotech startups, research foundations—all placed their bets on amyloid.
Atlanta Black Crackers1 mentions across 1 issues

Atlanta Black Crackers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2021 and June 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "their Negro League team was the Atlanta Black Crackers". It most often appears alongside Arizona, Atlanta Crackers, Australia.

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Atlanta Black Crackers
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1
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1
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June 23, 2021
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June 23, 2021
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Links For June
June 23, 2021 · Original source
9: Upset that the Atlanta Braves unfairly stereotype Native Americans? Apparently Atlanta is an equal opportunity offensive-sports-team-haver: their team used to be called the Atlanta Crackers (and their Negro League team was the Atlanta Black Crackers!)
Inline links: Atlanta Crackers, Atlanta Black Crackers
Atlanta Crackers1 mentions across 1 issues

Atlanta Crackers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2021 and June 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "their team used to be called the Atlanta Crackers". It most often appears alongside Arizona, Atlanta Black Crackers, Australia.

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Atlanta Crackers
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1
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1
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June 23, 2021
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June 23, 2021
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Links For June
June 23, 2021 · Original source
9: Upset that the Atlanta Braves unfairly stereotype Native Americans? Apparently Atlanta is an equal opportunity offensive-sports-team-haver: their team used to be called the Atlanta Crackers (and their Negro League team was the Atlanta Black Crackers!)
Inline links: Atlanta Crackers, Atlanta Black Crackers
Atlantic Institute1 mentions across 1 issues

Atlantic Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""And the Atlantic Institute"". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

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Atlantic Institute
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1
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1
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March 18, 2021
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March 18, 2021
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Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
And speaking of sinister conspiracies - a charismatic imam named Fethullah Gulen had founded a perfectly legitimate above-board network of high-quality schools around the world. After the anti-Islam coup of 1997, he fled to the US as a refugee and continued to run his school network, including schools "in 180 countries", "160 charter schools in the US", almost all the cram schools in Turkey, and "strong networks in Africa and the Balkans, where the highest-quality schools are often Gulenist and educate the children of the political elite". Also various US-based lobbying groups. And a lot of Turkish organizations wielding soft power. And the Atlantic Institute, the the Pacifica Institute, and the Niagara Foundation, and the Institute for Interfaith Dialogue, and various other Institutes and Foundations and think tanks, more than you would think any normal person would need. And a weird number of graduates of Gulen schools seemed to grow up to get high positions in the militaries and judiciaries of a surprising number of countries with unknown sources of funding. All totally above-board.
Atlas1 mentions across 1 issues

Atlas is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time"; "broke all of Atlas’s sales records"; "Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Atlas
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish
Inline links: The Educated Mind, Greeking Out, Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man, Dark Universe, appropriately mocked, memes, attempting to build a universe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MbHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b4711e-2248-4120-897e-bba8a595a28b_405x616.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OCj5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9afeb585-b58b-4932-8702-153b4fdf135d_619x305.png, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OzTl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49fd3582-b5bd-4567-b5e9-cca46c1f1c49_425x615.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png
Why write a review about Silver Age Marvel Comics? Why is it worth your time to read it?
How did the Silver Age Marvel Superhero Comics happen - the origin of the origins?
Atlas Comics1 mentions across 1 issues

Atlas Comics is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Atlas Comics
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish
Inline links: The Educated Mind, Greeking Out, Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man, Dark Universe, appropriately mocked, memes, attempting to build a universe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MbHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b4711e-2248-4120-897e-bba8a595a28b_405x616.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OCj5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9afeb585-b58b-4932-8702-153b4fdf135d_619x305.png, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OzTl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49fd3582-b5bd-4567-b5e9-cca46c1f1c49_425x615.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png
Marvel1 mentions across 1 issues

Atlas/Marvel is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Between November 1961 and December 1965 Atlas/Marvel published 296 superhero comic book issues". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Marvel
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish
Inline links: The Educated Mind, Greeking Out, Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man, Dark Universe, appropriately mocked, memes, attempting to build a universe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MbHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b4711e-2248-4120-897e-bba8a595a28b_405x616.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OCj5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9afeb585-b58b-4932-8702-153b4fdf135d_619x305.png, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OzTl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49fd3582-b5bd-4567-b5e9-cca46c1f1c49_425x615.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png
By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
Between November 1961 and December 1965 Atlas/Marvel published 296 superhero comic book issues. It took me more than two years but I read them all. I am glad I read them, but I am glad I read them in the way I am glad I did many things that I will never do again (bungee jumping comes to mind). They were not particularly enjoyable to read. If I wanted to be entertained I would be far better reading more modern comic book runs, but some things you don’t do for pure entertainment.
Atomic Energy Commission1 mentions across 1 issues

Atomic Energy Commission is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2023 and July 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "So the Atomic Energy Commission did what industry and government always do in times of crisis: It formed a commission". It most often appears alongside 1960 Valdivia earthquake, AEC, Bayesian priors.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2023
Last seen
July 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Safe Enough?
July 01, 2023 · Original source
So the Atomic Energy Commission did what industry and government always do in times of crisis: It formed a commission. It proposed to unveil to the public a better risk assessment tool, not so much for use by industry (since nuclear power was, to them, obviously safe), but as a particularly intense form of content marketing:
Atreides1 mentions across 1 issues

Atreides is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 13, 2022 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "in the service of the Atreides". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, ancient Greeks.

Reference entry
Atreides
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 13, 2022
Last seen
August 13, 2022
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Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad’ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You’ve Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire.
In the second and third books of the series, Duncan Idaho returned to life (and death) in the service of the Atreides. In the Duniverse, both your mind and your cells have memory, each Duncan clone carries the memories of the original. Through the same mechanism of ancestral/cellular memory, Leto has seen Duncan’s sacrifices through two generations of eyes in addition to his own.
If Duncan Idaho represents the “mongrel strength” of the wild, primitive human as Leto claims, Moneo is a fully domesticated purebred. He is a direct line descendent of the Atreides, and thus a result of 35 centuries of Leto’s behavioral and genetic design. In a way also similar to the purebred, he is high-strung. He spends the greater part of the book being really, really nervous any time he’s around Leto, for whom he serves as a right-hand man.
Attorneys General of California1 mentions across 1 issues

Attorneys General of California is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 13, 2025 and March 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The relevant regulators are the Attorneys General of California"; "are the Attorneys General of California (where OpenAI operates)". It most often appears alongside ACLU, AI Lab Watch, Altman.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 13, 2025
Last seen
March 13, 2025
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OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
The relevant regulators are the Attorneys General of California (where OpenAI operates) and Delaware (where it is registered). They try not to second-guess company boards’ decisions too much, limiting their intervention to clear fraud without even a fig leaf of honesty. But $0.00 wouldn’t even have that fig leaf. So Altman needs to figure out the lowest number he can offer that gives the board a fig leaf of accepting a fair offer and trying to benefit humanity.
Audubon Society1 mentions across 1 issues

Audubon Society is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "editor of the Audubon Society’s official publication, Bird-Lore". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry
Audubon Society
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 30, 2021
Last seen
April 30, 2021
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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Vogt’s life begins in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, New York. At fourteen, he contracts polio, which leaves him with a Richard III-esque limp and drives him from his preferred leisure activity, hiking, to the gentlemanly sport of bird-watching. It is this hobby that brings him into contact with the nascent environmental movement of the 1930s, and soon he is doing unpaid field work, editing, and writing for various ecological societies on the East Coast. He becomes director of the Jones Beach State Bird Sanctuary in Long Island, where he notices the sudden dwindling in local bird populations and launches a polemical campaign against what he believes to be the culprit: government-sponsored public works projects to drain ditches and marshes and spray pesticides to control the mosquito population, intended to curb the spread of malaria. Vogt refers to these efforts as "‘perilously close to destructive government-sponsored rackets’" and uses his position as editor of the Audubon Society’s official publication, Bird-Lore, to lambast them with such venom that the president of the Audubon Society tells him to stop and, eventually, fires him. (Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.)
Inline links: dovekie, ridiculously cute
Augmentation Research Center1 mentions across 1 issues

Augmentation Research Center is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 19, 2025
Last seen
September 19, 2025
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
After his Framework was published in 1962, under the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center to make, in essence, some version of the Memex a reality. The ARC received funding from NASA and ARPA, and after six years, Engelbart released his oN-Line System (NLS). It was a revelation.
AUL1 mentions across 1 issues

AUL is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry
AUL
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Austin Less Wrong1 mentions across 1 issues

Austin Less Wrong is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 01, 2026 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry
Austin Less Wrong
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 01, 2026
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
...ay 30th, 12:00 PM Location: The Brewtorium, 6015 Dillard Cir A, Austin, TX 78752; will be at an indoor table with an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862487GM+96 Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/ Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Dogs are not allowed indoors. If parking fills up, you can park on the street in the neighborhood off Denson Drive. BELTON Contact: Micha...
Austin LessWrong1 mentions across 1 issues

Austin LessWrong is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "just look for the Austin LessWrong and ACX Meetup signs". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

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Austin LessWrong
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1
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1
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March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA Contact: Silas Barta Contact Info: sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 25th, 12:00 PM Location: The Brewtorium, 6015 Dillard Cir A, Austin, TX 78752, we'll be inside somewhere, just look for the Austin LessWrong and ACX Meetup signs Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862487GM+96 Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/ Notes: You can park on the streets in front of Brewtorium or the Milk Bank lot next door. If it really gets full, use the nearby residential streets. We'll be there until at least 5pm!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/862487GM+96
Australian Gambling Research Center1 mentions across 1 issues

Australian Gambling Research Center is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 14, 2021 and May 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Photo credit: Australian Gambling Research Center". It most often appears alongside Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Amazon, American Gaming Association.

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1
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1
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May 14, 2021
Last seen
May 14, 2021
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Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
Photo credit: Australian Gambling Research Center Originally, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on line 1, shown in yellow on the top left. Contemporary machines allow you to win if you get winning symbols on any of these 50 (and sometimes more) lines! These are not intuitive, straightforward ways of winning. You cannot convince me that lines 28, 39, or 45 are reasonable. These are lines drawn by game designers who acted like they were getting paid by the line.
Inline links: Australian Gambling Research Center
Australian National University1 mentions across 1 issues

Australian National University is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "parking at ANU should be a bit easier after 5pm". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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1
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1
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April 10, 2022
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April 10, 2022
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Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy B (andy.bachler@gmail.com) Date: April 13 Time: 5:45 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4FC+34 Location: Badger & Co (a pub in ANU). I will be wearing glasses and will have a sign with ACX MeetUp on it. Notes: Apologies that this might be tricky to get to for some people but the parking at ANU should be a bit easier after 5pm!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4FC+34
Australian Senate1 mentions across 1 issues

Australian Senate is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate"; "give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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Australian Senate
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1
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1
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June 18, 2025
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June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Australian think tank1 mentions across 1 issues

Australian think tank is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "But an anti-drug Australian think tank argues". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

Reference entry
Australian think tank
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 23, 2022
Last seen
June 23, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
But an anti-drug Australian think tank argues that the peak in 2001 is made up: Claims that there were more than 75 drug-related deaths in 2001 which more than halved to 34 deaths in 2002 use a figure for 2001 for which there is no substantiation. Official drug-related deaths for Portugal, taken from the latest 2018 EMCDDA Statistical Bulletin are copied below. Notice that there is no such figure recorded for 2001. They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things. The link contains two datasets, both of which seem to be measuring the same thing but getting different results. One dataset starts in 2002, the other in 2008. I don’t know what the difference here is, but they’re right that neither includes 2001. If you ignore the pre-2002 data, the graph looks like this: They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to the updated 2020 version of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: an anti-drug Australian think tank, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CN2E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85656c06-22bc-4076-80f0-b7a9bd4aa0d3_574x331.png, the updated 2020 version, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VvrE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2341944a-388d-4da9-9788-8474567b83fc_540x737.png, Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
Australians for Pandemic Prevention1 mentions across 1 issues

Australians for Pandemic Prevention is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Minnesota and Virginia also have legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We are monitoring these efforts. There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have presented to city officials in the City of South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes. Meanwhile, we have soft launched and developed the OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods. Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the Progress and Poverty Substack growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities. Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do. 65: EN’s Work On Bacteriophage Therapy Our project is aimed at pioneering phage therapy in Nigeria, where limited resources/infrastructure have historically held back research in this field. Starting from the ground up, we are establishing the foundational systems needed to support a robust phage research ecosystem. So far, we’ve isolated 34 bacteriophages targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an essential step toward building a comprehensive phage bank. This began with collecting a wide range of clinical Pseudomonas isolates, which we are now characterizing alongside the phages through genome sequencing and phenotypic assays including studies on phage stability across pH, temperature, and salinity ranges. Our long-term goal is to develop a phage-based hydrogel for treating diabetic wounds. On the regulatory front, we have secured approval from the Attorney General to register our nonprofit organization, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics. Additionally, we’re expanding into vaccine development; following a research stay in Prof. Roderick's lab at the University of Waterloo, we have initiated the design of a phage-based universal Salmonella vaccine aimed at covering all major serotypes—an urgent need underscored by Africa’s reliance on external vaccine sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have signed an MTA agreement with Roderick to use his phage-based vaccine platform patents to enable us to design vaccines against any common disease affecting us. This is only the beginning, but we are proud to be laying the scientific and institutional groundwork for homegrown phage innovation in Africa. Emergent Ventures funded EN before we did and deserves a lot of credit here also. 66: Create An Artificial Kidney For an implantable artificial kidney, the first essential component is a hemofilter designed to emulate the glomerulus. Critical requirements for this hemofilter include high permeability (to maximize flow for a given area), selectivity (specifically, the retention of albumin), and robust blood compatibility (ensuring sustained function over time). Our initial strategy focused on using negative surface charge to reduce fouling. I began by testing polyelectrolyte (PE) coatings on 24nm pore membranes featuring a negative terminal charge, similar to the glomerular barrier. These initial static tests, assessing platelet adsorption in whole blood, yielded positive outcomes for some polyelectrolytes, indicating potentially desirable blood compatibility. However, static test setups are not truly representative of dynamic in-vitro conditions and don't provide data on key parameters like permeability, fouling progression, or changes in membrane selectivity. To address these limitations, I designed and built a blood filtration setup. This system sustains human whole blood in circulation for 20 minutes, allowing us to analyze all the aforementioned parameters, as well as platelet activation markers. This has resulted in a fairly high-throughput system for evaluating any surface coating. I'm pleased to report this setup has been accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference. I am also currently working on a full manuscript, as I believe this system offers a viable way to partially replace animal experiments in our early-stage research, requiring only 1.2ml of human blood per run. Working with a PhD student (hired to support both this research and work on membrane substrates), we have continued testing these PE coatings, alongside PEG coatings, on our membranes. Here, we're finding that optimization of the coating layer is crucial. With the current PE coatings, we observe a permeability drop of about an order of magnitude compared to the base membrane, making them unsuitable for an implantable device in their present form. This is likely due to the specific nature of the initial PE layer, which we can modify. We also suspect there may be ingress of PE into the pores, meaning we're not achieving just a surface coating (our goal), but rather a very thick coating, which would explain the flux loss. Optimizing the coating process to control penetration depth is now a primary focus of my ongoing work. I am currently aiming for a flux of 20ul/min (as this is cap introduced by the protein gel layer anyway) but for it to be at this 'steady state' permeability without drop in permeability. I am also imaging the membranes after contact with SEM to see if there is indeed any platelet adsorption etc. Tugrul has the dubious honor of maybe being "the only person to climb a 4000m peak with severe kidney failure". To raise money and awareness for his artificial kidney project, he is running Climb Against Time, where he will climb 41 mountains over 4000m (13000 ft) this summer. He is looking for donors and climbing partners. 67: Add Tardigrade Genes To Human Cells The goal of this one was to make hybrid cells that are more resilient for research and certain medical applications. They report: The grant was to synthesize vectors for the expression of humanized tardigrade proteins that can be targeted to different areas of the cell. All the vectors were designed, generated, and transposed into human cells. The proteins all localize successfully (e.g. they match the designed target), with one exception (we are still working on validating it). We've done some stress testing with the trangenic cells, but haven't reached firm conclusions yet. We've further generated some multigene designs but have not yet transposed them into cells, but should shortly. We're hoping to submit a manuscript on the first round later this year. 68: Teach Forecasting To EU Policy-Makers The original project didn't work out, but our grantee (who still prefers to remain anonymous) is now working with an EU think tank pursuing the same agenda, and has been teaching forecasting workshops to policy-makers for the past two months. 69: Platform For Single-Cell Imaging They ended up unable to accept this grant and returned the money. 70: Open Source Polygenic Predictor For EA/IQ They have an update here. They think they have a predictor that can explain 12% of variance in intelligence, and they’re working on validating it and creating an easy-to-use website. 71: Improve Flu Vaccines The grant mainly funded agent based modelling to demonstrate the benefit of pre-existing immunity to pandemic influenza if and when a future pandemic occurs (academic publication will result). The original proposal was to attempt to influence the WHO influenza strain selection process. After attending WHO meetings and a global influenza conference, I believe this is not feasible. Stakeholder feedback was the potential short term negative effect on vaccine hesitancy is believed to outweigh the less tangible future benefit. Given the conservative nature of decision makers, pandemic vaccines are likely to remain research only. There are still green shoots of research into pandemic preparedness/prevention that I am continuing to work on. I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors, another group that ACX funded in 2024. 72: Scenario Analysis For Developing World Agricultural Programs In addition to the research and analysis funded by the grant, I’ve learned to code with LLMs and have built an MVP of the project. The app is being considered for further development by staff at a large international organization. 73: Further C’s Political Career C’s political career is going well, but he continues to think it wouldn’t be strategic to give more information publicly at this time. Lessons Learned I'm most impressed with our lobbying/advocacy organizations. In particular, Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration, partner with various x-risk-related organizations, and (possibly) extend charity tax deductions to some EA causes that previously didn't have it - I think this on its own goes a substantial way to paying back the cost of all ACX Grants. Coalition to Modify NOTA has a kidney donation bill in front of Congress that the (very illiquid) prediction markets give a 45% chance of passing; if it works, it could save thousands of lives. The Georgists are partly responsible for bills making land value taxes slightly easier to implement in a handful of states. Good Science Project seems to have significantly improved science. Are lobbying organizations a better bet than other types of nonprofit (within the constraints of ACX Grants)? I'm not sure. It could just be that lobbyists are (naturally) better at playing themselves up and sounding successful than (for example) scientists, or that politicians are good at people-pleasing and make people feel heard and encouraged in a way that might not change overall policy later. Also, I recently talked to some grantmakers who funded a lobbying organization that superficially seems excellent, but they expressed concern it was net negative (!) by taking away oxygen and spotlight from potentially more effective orgs. So I am encouraged but wary. Animal welfare organizations were another standout success. Again, I don't know how to think about this - while I think our grantees were exceptional, there's also an issue where the scale of animal welfare challenges is so great, and work on them so neglected, that lots of organizations can save a million chickens here, or a million fish there, without particularly making a splash. On the one hand, this is exactly what effective altruism should be doing - exploring grants that are very high in linear utility even if they don't feel satisfying. On the other, they're unsatisfying - and also hard to assess retroactively. How many chickens should a good animal welfare grant save? Any realistic number will both be overwhelmingly large in absolute terms and far too small in relative terms. I'm most ambivalent about our science grants. Many of them say they are successful and can point to published papers which explain the science they did. But it's hard to judge whether anything useful has changed based on the science getting done. I know it's important to fund basic research and not just last-mile technology startups, but it's hard for a mini-grants program like this one to evaluate these kinds of abstract interventions. One disappointing result was that grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups (whether companies or nonprofits). For example, Innovate Animal Ag was in many ways overdetermined as a grantee - former Yale grad and Google engineer founder, profiled in NYT, already funded by Open Philanthropy - and they in fact did amazing work. On the other hand, there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering (although this also describes Manifold, one of our standout successes). One thing I still don't understand is that Innovate Animal Ag seemed to genuinely need more funding despite being legibly great and high status - does this screen off a theoretical objection that they don't provide ACX Grants with as much counterfactual impact? Am I really just mad that it would be boring to give too many grants to obviously-good things that even moron could spot as promising? Someone (I think it might be Paul Graham) once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded quickly, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time. In almost every case where I thought to myself “this is a cool idea, but I don’t know how it’s going to really pay off, as opposed to reaching a cool intermediate accomplishment and then stagnating”, this was a correct criticism, and I should have taken it more seriously. But I can’t rule out that these were good in vague and hard-to-measure ways that I should take more seriously. This one is really self-serving, but in general when people were good communicators (or even bloggers) and wowed me with the writing-composition of their application, they turned out to be a good bet. And when people were hard to understand and annoying to communicate with, even if their ideas seemed good, they were less likely to pan out. Overall Thoughts The total cost of ACX Grants, both rounds, was about $3 million. Do these outcomes represent a successful use of that amount of money? Very naively, startups originating from ACX Grants have about $50 million in value1. If ACX Grants is equivalent to a pre-seed funder, and pre-seed funders usually get ~5%, then if we were VCs we would have a portfolio worth $2.5 million. About 1/5 of ACX Grants were attempting to be market-valued startups, so if we assume the charitable portion did about as well as the startup portion, then the charity portion is “worth” $10 million. There’s some reason to expect this is too high, since much of the startup value came from one successful outlier. But there’s another reason to expect this is too low, since we were aiming at charity rather than market cap, and any actual market cap that our grantees got was an unexpected side effect. I’m treating this as a sanity check rather than as a real number. It’s harder to produce Inside View estimates, because so many of the projects either produce vague deliverables (eg a white paper that might guide future action) or intermediate results only (eg getting a government to pass AI safety regulations is good, but can’t be considered an end result unless those regulations prevent the AI apocalypse). Because we tend towards incubating charities and funding research (rather than last-mile causes like buying bednets), achieved measurable deliverables are thin on the ground. But here are things that ACX grantees have already accomplished: Improved the living/slaughter conditions of 30 million fish.
Inline links: Progress and Poverty Substack, Climb Against Time, here, 1
australiansforaisafety.com.au1 mentions across 1 issues

australiansforaisafety.com.au is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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1
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June 18, 2025
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June 18, 2025
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Austrian Empire1 mentions across 1 issues

Austrian Empire is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 14, 2022 and April 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adrian D’Souza, Aleph.

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Austrian Empire
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1
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1
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April 14, 2022
Last seen
April 14, 2022
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Links For April
April 14, 2022 · Original source
3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3.
Inline links: secret plan to resurrect Byzantium
Austrian political parties1 mentions across 1 issues

Austrian political parties is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 04, 2023 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "he was already perfecting his political playbook by observing the successes and failures of the Austrian political parties". It most often appears alongside Academy’s School of Architecture, Adolf, Adolf Hitler.

Mention count
1
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1
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August 04, 2023
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August 04, 2023
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Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
Hitler was developing more than just his abhorrent racial ideology during his time in Vienna. Although still apparently intending to be some kind of artist, he was already perfecting his political playbook by observing the successes and failures of the Austrian political parties. He invented theories about what let the dominant parties win and what made the lesser parties lose. He even put into practice his ideas about the importance of oratory:
Austrians1 mentions across 1 issues

Austrians is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2021 and November 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hungary has been conquered and occupied by ... Austrians". It most often appears alongside Alcsutdoboz, Allied Powers, Angela Merkel.

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Austrians
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1
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1
First seen
November 04, 2021
Last seen
November 04, 2021
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Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.
Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Party For Moderate Progress Within The Bounds Of The Law1 mentions across 1 issues

Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Party For Moderate Progress Within The Bounds Of The Law is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2023 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "One of the earliest “joke” political parties was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Party For Moderate Progress Within The Bounds Of The Law". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, AI Policy Institute, Arizona.

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1
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1
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December 01, 2023
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December 01, 2023
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Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
...so if we get another record-breaking summer next year, it will be some extra evidence for the sulfur hypothesis? 41: One of the earliest “joke” political parties was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Party For Moderate Progress Within The Bounds Of The Law . 42: Related to previous discussion on Twitter bringing in fewer links than it used to ( link ): 43: You might have heard that “every European alive today is a descenda...
...temporary, but sulfur aerosol changes are permanent, so if we get another record-breaking summer next year, it will be some extra evidence for the sulfur hypothesis? 41: One of the earliest “joke” political parties was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Party For Moderate Progress Within The Bounds Of The Law . 42: Related to previous discussion on Twitter bringing in fewer links than it used to ( link ): 43: You might have heard that “every European alive today is a descenda...
Autocast1 mentions across 1 issues

Autocast is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 25, 2023 and April 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "They create a dataset, Autocast, with 6000 questions from forecasting tournaments". It most often appears alongside API, Conditional Pairs, CSET Foretell.

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Autocast
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1
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1
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April 25, 2023
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April 25, 2023
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  • 23 April 25, 2023
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23
April 25, 2023 · Original source
This is the basic idea behind Zou et al (2022), Forecasting Future World Events With Neural Networks. They create a dataset, Autocast, with 6000 questions from forecasting tournaments Metaculus, Good Judgment Project, and CSET Foretell. Then they ask their AI (a variant of GPT-2) to predict them, given news articles up to some date before the event happened. Here’s their result:
Inline links: Forecasting Future World Events With Neural Networks
You can access their dataset here. The authors were originally planning to host a competition to see who could create the best AI forecaster, but due to financial constraints they’ll be running only a reduced version. You can read more about the semi-competition here.
Inline links: access their dataset here, here
Autodesk1 mentions across 1 issues

Autodesk is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk"; "In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu"; "By the occasion of Autodesk’s divestiture from Xanadu". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

Reference entry
Autodesk
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
September 19, 2025
Last seen
September 19, 2025
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!
Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan
By the occasion of Autodesk’s divestiture from Xanadu, everyone knew Berners-Lee’s creation was the Next Big Thing. It was released publicly in 1993—four years past John Walker’s deadline for Xanadu—and Netscape went public in 1995—Walker’s revolution came right on schedule.
Of course, Nelson deserves plenty of blame too. In many ways, he really was a nutjob, and he certainly wasn’t capable of building Xanadu on his own—still, the concept itself was solid! If Nelson hadn’t turned down Vannevar Bush and Bill Gates and Robin Williams and the half-dozen other famous people he claims were kissing his ass at one point or another, maybe someone sometime could’ve figured out how to build it for him. But he couldn’t do it. Nelson was too busy play-acting as a great, tortured, persecuted genius. By the time he’d become pacified enough to let Autodesk help him build Xanadu, he was too pacified to exercise any sort of authority or discipline over his project anymore. He just went to his sex parties and watched it all burn.
AvalancheGenesis1 mentions across 1 issues

AvalancheGenesis is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 29, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "AvalancheGenesis has more on shoplifting". It most often appears alongside A History Of Mankind, ACS, Alexander Turok.

Reference entry
AvalancheGenesis
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
June 29, 2022
Last seen
June 29, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
AvalancheGenesis has more on shoplifting:
Inline links: has more on shoplifting
Avengers1 mentions across 1 issues

Avengers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the X-men and the Avengers team up"; "essential sidekick to the Hulk and later the Avengers". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Avengers
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish
Inline links: The Educated Mind, Greeking Out, Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man, Dark Universe, appropriately mocked, memes, attempting to build a universe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MbHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b4711e-2248-4120-897e-bba8a595a28b_405x616.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OCj5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9afeb585-b58b-4932-8702-153b4fdf135d_619x305.png, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OzTl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49fd3582-b5bd-4567-b5e9-cca46c1f1c49_425x615.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png
By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Aver1 mentions across 1 issues

Aver is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 21, 2022 and March 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "New (to me) site, Aver". It most often appears alongside ACX 2022 Prediction Contest Data, ACX Grants, Almaty.

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Aver
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  • 22 March 21, 2022
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22
March 21, 2022 · Original source
First, using the geometric mean of odds rather than the average of the probabilities. See here for a writeup of why this is a reasonable thing to do.
Inline links: here
5: New (to me) site, Aver. So far not many interesting markets, and very crypto-focused, but somehow (?) they have six-figure pools on several questions. Got to figure out what’s going on here.
Inline links: Aver
Axis1 mentions across 1 issues

Axis is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 05, 2023 and April 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "it wasn’t a “race” in the sense that the Axis knew about it and was competing". It most often appears alongside AI, Alan Turing, America.

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Axis
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Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
The most consequential “races” have been for specific military technologies during wars; most famously, the US won the “race” for nuclear weapons. America’s enemies got nukes soon afterwards, but the brief moment of dominance was enough to win World War II. Maybe in some sense the British won a “race” for radar, although it wasn’t a “race” in the sense that the Axis knew about it and was competing to get it first. Maybe in some sense countries “race” to get better fighter jets, tanks, satellites, etc than their rivals. But ordinary mortals don’t concern themselves with such things. No part of US automobile policy is based on “winning the car race” against China, in some sense where consumer car R&D will affect tanks and our military risks being left behind.
Axis powers1 mentions across 1 issues

Axis powers is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2022 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Axis powers stood for the Old World Order". It most often appears alongside 1793, 1821, 1847.

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Axis powers
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Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
The Axis powers stood for the Old World Order. Germany, Japan, and Italy had each rejected the principles of the Peace Pact—Japan by invading Manchuria and continuing into China, French Indochina, British Malaya, Indonesia, and Singapore; Italy by invading Ethiopia, Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa; and Germany by seeking to gain control of nearly all of Europe. Each had a reason to resent the Allies and their efforts to outlaw war. The Axis powers had largely missed out on the colonial land grab. Japan only began to participate in international affairs in the 1860s, and it was more than a generation before it was prepared to project military force outside its own borders, too late to successfully participate in the empire-building scramble. Both Germany and Italy finally achieved unification in the same year—1871. They joined the land grab soon after, but were never as successful as France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, which built extensive empires. Without the authority to wage war and conquer new territory, the Axis powers saw little possibility of ever achieving equality. (Chapter 8)
Axsome1 mentions across 1 issues

Axsome is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "maybe Axsome did some preliminary studies". It most often appears alongside ACT/SSC, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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Axsome
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Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
But, this is isn’t about me or my company. This is about a much larger (but still small), much later stage biotech: Axsome Therapeutics. They have a market cap that, until 3 days ago, was hovering around $2 billion, and a drug that, until 3 days ago, looked to be approved very soon for treating major depressive disorder.
Inline links: Axsome Therapeutics
You see, Axsome thought they were in a good place, as did the stock market. Axome had a drug, bupropion-dextromethorphan, which had done well in their phase 3 trials for major depressive disorder. The next step after that is to submit the drug for approval to the FDA, which, when there are such clear indications of improvement, is usually a layup. An annoying layup, filled with lots of paperwork, but a layup.
Inline links: done well in their phase 3 trials for major depressive disorder
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the FDA sent Axsome a letter on July 30 saying that they found “deficiencies” that prevented them from moving forward with the approval. What are those deficiencies? Oh, the FDA doesn’t say. They don’t even give a hint. They just told them to hang tight until August 22.
Inline links: the FDA sent Axsome a letter on July 30 saying that they found “deficiencies” that prevented them from moving forward with the approval
Axsome Therapeutics1 mentions across 1 issues

Axsome Therapeutics is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "much later stage biotech: Axsome Therapeutics". It most often appears alongside ACT/SSC, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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Axsome Therapeutics
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Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
But, this is isn’t about me or my company. This is about a much larger (but still small), much later stage biotech: Axsome Therapeutics. They have a market cap that, until 3 days ago, was hovering around $2 billion, and a drug that, until 3 days ago, looked to be approved very soon for treating major depressive disorder.
Inline links: Axsome Therapeutics
Ayn Rand Institute1 mentions across 1 issues

Ayn Rand Institute is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 03, 2021 and March 03, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Does the Ayn Rand Institute think it’s immoral to accept your government stimulus check?". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Argentina, Austin Allred.

Reference entry
Ayn Rand Institute
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 03, 2021
Last seen
March 03, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For March
March 03, 2021 · Original source
12: Does the Ayn Rand Institute think it’s immoral to accept your government stimulus check? (answer: no, “Ayn Rand wrote an article arguing that it is proper to take government money from programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance on the condition that the recipient “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare-statism.”)
Inline links: think it’s immoral to accept your government stimulus check?
Azov Battalion1 mentions across 1 issues

Azov Battalion is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 08, 2022 and March 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "overestimating the relevance of the Azov Battalion". It most often appears alongside Achilles, Afghan, America.

Reference entry
Azov Battalion
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 08, 2022
Last seen
March 08, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
(before the war, I saw people on both sides overestimating the relevance of the Azov Battalion, ie the neo-fascists, on the grounds that only neo-fascists would have enough traditional values left to put up a real fight)