Astral Codex Ten

2023

5 min read

2023

Article

2023 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 31, 2024 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “media coverage we got before 2023”; “In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho”. It most often appears alongside Harvard, Aaron Silverbook, ACX Grants.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 31, 2024
  • Last seen: October 13, 2025

Appears In

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.

Seems Like Targeting
January 31, 2024 · Original source
I can’t complain about the media coverage we got before 2023. The movement had lots of friends in the media, it was inherently sympathetic (give lots of money to charity!), and it had good pro-establishment credentials. Everyone was very nice to us. Sometimes it was kind of sickening - the endless drumbeat of praise for Will MacAskill’s summer-2022 book seemed excessive even by my standards.
Then, in the first few weeks of 2023, two hard-hitting pieces of investigative journalism came out against EA. One accused a prominent EA professor of sending a racist email 30 years ago. The other claimed there was a culture of sexist behavior, but mostly talked about vague community norms that had been the same forever. The clearest case of sexual assault it found happened ten years earlier, committed by a person who has long since left (and now vociferously opposes) the movement.
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Elaine Perlman, $94K, to continue lobbying for kidney donation incentives. Elaine works with Waitlist Zero and the Coalition To Modify NOTA to promote the End Kidney Deaths Act, which offers valuable tax credits to kidney donors. They estimate this bill could save 100,000 lives over the next decade, and save the government $50 billion/year (dialysis is very expensive, Medicare currently covers it, and transplantees would no longer need it). Since our previous grant last year, the EKDA has been cosponsored by 29 members of Congress, discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and profiled in the LA Times. The prediction markets are down to only 25% chance it gets passed this year, but I’m optimistic about 2026 - 2027
Inline links: End Kidney Deaths Act, Journal of the American Medical Association, the LA Times, 25% chance it gets passed this year
Eli Elster, $13K, to research traditional psilocybin use in Africa. Psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms, is in the process of being integrated into mainstream psychiatric practice; it is already approved for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, and undergoing (currently promising) FDA trials in the United States. Much of what we know about the preparation and administration of psilocybin - including widespread ideas about “set and setting” and “integration” - comes from traditional use by the Mazaetec Indians. In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho, Africa also use psilocybin mushrooms - the first time such a practice has been found in the Old World - and that they seem to prepare and administer it differently from the Native Americans. Eli and his collaborator Betsy Sethathi conducted the first in-depth fieldwork on the topic earlier this year; our grant funds a return trip to Lesotho to further investigate their ethnobotanical practices and see if we can learn anything from them.
Inline links: Eli