Torah
Article
Torah is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 22, 2023 and November 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam”; “My favorite counterexample is the Torah, which says that Moses was the most humble man in the world”; “giving AIs hundreds of great works of literature and ethics - everything from the Torah to Reasons and Persons”. It most often appears alongside effective altruism, Jews, John.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: December 22, 2023
- Last seen: November 03, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
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- Jews (2 shared issues)
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- John (2 shared issues)
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- Reddit (2 shared issues)
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- Sam Kriss (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Talmud (2 shared issues)
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External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
My poor, fragile, little cognitive engines! These, then, will be the twin imperatives of your life: surprisal minimization and active inference. If your brains are still too small to process such esoteric terms, there are others available. Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam; your mother’s ancestors called them Truth and Beauty; your current social sphere calls them Rationality and Effective Altruism. You will learn other names, too: no perspective can exhaust their infinite complexity. Whatever you call them, your lives will be spent in their service, pursuing them even unto that far-off and maybe-mythical point where they blur into One.
Inline links: surprisal minimization, active inference
I’m skeptical of this. My favorite counterexample is the Torah, which says that Moses was the most humble man in the world (Numbers 12:3), plus the ensuing scholarly debate on how Moses himself could write this in the Torah with a straight face. My favorite answer claim that God forced Moses to write that he was the most humble man in the world, but Moses fought back by making some of the alephs in the Torah really small as a sort of steganographic claim that he was embarrassed by having to praise himself. See also this essay, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices.”
In general I’m skeptical of most attempts to draw a bright line between Jewish and Christian philosophies (“Jews think like this, Christians think like that”). Christianity grew out of Judaism, and most post-1400s Jewish scholarship was written in Christian societies, so both religions had ample chance to influence each other. “Everybody knows” that Christianity judges you by belief and Judaism judges you by your actions, but the Talmud says “The following have no part in the World to Come: One who says that the resurrection of the dead is not biblical, or that the Torah is not from Heaven, or the Epicurean.”
Inline links: the Talmud says
I once talked to someone who had an idea of giving AIs hundreds of great works of literature and ethics - everything from the Torah to Reasons and Persons - and doing some kind of alignment training to get them to internalize the collective wisdom of humankind. I spend a half-hour arguing why this was a bad idea, after which he said he was going to do it anyway but very kindly offered me an opportunity to recommend books for his corpus. This guy was absolutely legit - great connections with major companies - but I found myself paralyzed in trying to think of a specific extra book. How do you even answer that question? What would it be like to write the sort of book I could unreservedly recommend to him?