mouse
Article
mouse is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 19, 2022 and July 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “brain of a cat trying to catch a mouse”; ""a normal mouse (Lane 1)"". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, aducanumab, AGI.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: January 19, 2022
- Last seen: July 11, 2025
Appears In
- Practically-A-Book Review: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents
- Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
Related Pages
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- Astralcodexten Com (2 shared issues)
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- aducanumab (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- AI boxing problem (1 shared issues)
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- AI Safety (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaFold (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaGo (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaWorldConquest (1 shared issues)
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- Alzheimer’s (1 shared issues)
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- Alzheimer’s Disease (1 shared issues)
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- amyloid cascade hypothesis (1 shared issues)
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- amyloid precursor protein (1 shared issues)
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.
There was one other part of this conversation I found interesting, for reasons totally unrelated to AI. As part of their efforts to pin down this idea of “agency”, Eliezer and Richard talked about brains, eventually narrowing themselves down to the brain of a cat trying to catch a mouse.
Then there’s a longer discussion of which parts of the brain are or aren’t “consequentialist. The visual cortex? The motor cortex? What about in cats? How does a cat seeing a mouse turn into a motor “plan” for the cat to catch the mouse? I don’t find the particular neuroscience here very interesting, and apparently neither does Eliezer, because he eventually says:
A cat who fails to catch a mouse may then get little bits and pieces of catbrain adjusted all over.
When the cracks run that deep, it’s worth going back to the origin story—a landmark 1995 paper by Games et al., featured on the cover of Nature under the headline “A mouse model for Alzheimer’s.” It announced what was hailed as a breakthrough: the first genetically engineered mouse designed to mimic key features of the disease.
Inline links: a landmark 1995 paper by Games
Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation.
Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation. How—with Unlimited Time and Money and a Little Scientific Despair—to Make a Transgenic Mouse “Mouse Model Made” was the boastful headline to the independent, introductory commentary Nature solicited to accompany the 1995 Games paper’s unveiling of the first transgenic mouse set to “answer the needs” of Alzheimer’s research. The scientific argument over whether amyloid caused Alzheimer’s had been “settle[d]” by the Games paper, “perhaps for good.”