Astral Codex Ten

NASA

14 min read

NASA

Article

NASA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between January 04, 2022 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Asian Scientist (who is head of NASA)”; “Asian Scientist, the head of NASA, officially announces there’s nothing to worry about”; “Male Scientist and NASA told their victims every day that Tech Company’s comet retrieval plan was safe”. It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, SpaceX, Mars.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: January 04, 2022
  • Last seen: September 19, 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.

Movie Review: Don't Look Up
January 04, 2022 · Original source
In desperation, Male Scientist and Female Scientist finagle their way onto a big TV show. But all the subsequent press is about how sexy Male Scientist is and how shrill Female Scientist sounds. Still in desperation, they go to the New York Times and get an article about the comet. In response, the President has Asian Scientist (who is head of NASA) announce there’s nothing to worry about, and the Times drops their story and accuses the scientists of making them look bad.
But the worst part is…well, basically every scientific institution ends up lying. Asian Scientist, the head of NASA, officially announces there’s nothing to worry about. Tech CEO parades a bunch of Nobel Prize winners who endorse his idiotic plan and say it’ll go great. Male Scientist, during his work-within-the-system phase, makes commercials reassuring people that the comet won’t hurt them. The media is complicit in all of this, systematically preventing the populace from hearing the truth. The only scientist telling it like it is, Female Scientist, has (by the end of the movie) been kicked out of grad school and ended up bagging groceries.
But apply it to COVID, and it’s even worse. Dr. Fauci and the CDC tell me every day that Pfizer’s vaccine is safe - but Male Scientist and NASA told their victims every day that Tech Company’s comet retrieval plan was safe. Sounds like we can’t trust scientific authorities when there might be a profit motive involved, better skip the jab! I hear ivermectin looks promising…
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#83: Detect And Fight Healthcare Fraud Our company is using data to detect fraud against the government. Access to quality healthcare is dwindling in the United States. There is an estimated hundred billion dollars in fraud every year leading to lower standards of care and making healthcare unaffordable. We’re seeking a hundred thousand dollars to buy data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. This will allow us to find fraud and file lawsuits on behalf of the government. The Department of Justice signaled a new level of support for independent companies using data methods to identify fraud in June of last year when they picked up a case brought by Integra Med Analytics. For the past twelve months we’ve been working with attorneys specializing in this area (qui tam). We’ve been consolidating data returned from broad FOIA requests and begun assisting law firms with data science. Our team combines broad technical expertise (Google, NASA, LANL, NIST, UC Berkeley) with business acumen and investigative experience. The three of us have been working together on projects with positive externalities for five years. Previous successful projects include providing flexible housing, and a micro-targeting methods for political action. [Contact erbahr@gmail.com if you can help]
#123: Next-Generation mRNA Vaccines PopVax is an Indian startup working on next-generation mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, with a team of scientists that includes Moderna’s former Director of Chemistry and leading Indian mRNA experts. Our mRNA platform is built to tackle many of the problems inherent in those of Moderna & BioNTech-Pfizer, including their need for storage and transportation at supercold temperatures (our vaccine candidates use a novel LNP formulation and structural modifications to mRNA to achieve room-temperature stability for extended periods of time), their waning immunity to new variants (our multivalent sequences encode epitopes for existing and predicted future mutations), their extremely low-rate but real inducement of myocarditis in young men (we target delivery to avoid heart tissue), the high costs due to primarily western supply chains (we have built out a fully-indigenized, low-cost supply chain for critical raw materials), and, most importantly, their inability to produce sterilizing immunity in the mucosal membrane (our strategy involves an intranasal booster that we expect will, in most cases, block transmission). We have received a small amount of funding from the Gates Foundation, and are looking for a combination of grants and investment to fund both our clinical trials and simultaneous buildout of manufacturing in the existing GMP facilities of a large Indian pharma company, with the intent to bring online 1 billion+ doses of new capacity/year in 2022. Contact me at soham@soh.am.
Contra The Social Model Of Disability
July 14, 2023 · Original source
(if you’re hung up on Mt. Everest being natural, or un-climb-able even by most abled people, then replace this example with a wheelchair lift on a man-made hiking trail up a gently sloping hill. Or consider for example a spaceship. Before people invented spaceships, blind people couldn't be astronauts, because nobody could be astronauts; going to space was just fundamentally difficult. Then people invented spaceships that could be piloted by sighted astronauts, but couldn't be piloted by blind people. The invention of spaceships didn’t make blind people any less able to go to space than they were before; it requires a very strange contortion to think of the natural order of things as blind people as inherently destined to be astronauts, with society taking this away from them. So I think the most natural way of describing this is “being blind makes it hard to pilot a spaceship”, not “being blind has no relationship to piloting a spaceship, but NASA has chosen to deprioritize the needs of blind people in its spaceship design, which is what prevents blind people from going to space”)
Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability
July 25, 2023 · Original source
You say NASA building spaceships for the sighted only didn’t deprive the blind, but I disagree, if most everyone in society was blind, we’d still want to go to space and spaceships would’ve been built with the blind in mind, and the blind were deprived of the opportunity of living in a more blind compatible society
Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart - a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
I have worked in space engineering for years and my impression is that the big space agencies and companies have a lot of inertia and reluctance to consider new ideas and change. A lot of the processes have been built up in response to past failures, but they also stifle a lot of innovation. When people come in with a fresh approach and the resources to implement them, they have tended to get quite far. You can look at how SpaceX has done, but also the early days of the space program at NASA were a lot more open to innovation than today.
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
Progress Studies: Part of the appeal of neoreaction was that the past seemed better at a lot of practical and important things than the present. The 1950s gave us moon missions, the interstate highway system, cheap housing, amazing public infrastructure, and ambitious government programs to end poverty. Nowadays NASA struggles to launch anything without help from SpaceX, the government is too gridlocked for Congress to pass even small tweaks, and the tiniest amount of new infrastructure costs billions and suffers decades-long delays.
In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities
March 21, 2024 · Original source
What is the probability that AI will destroy humanity this century? The argument against: usually we use probability to represent an outcome from some well-behaved distribution. For example, if there are 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, the probability of pulling out a white ball is 40%. If you pulled out 100 balls, close to 40 of them would be white. You can literally pull out the balls and do the experiment. In contrast, saying “there’s a 45% probability people will land on Mars before 2050” seems to come out of nowhere. How do you know? If you were to say “the probability humans will land on Mars is exactly 45.11782%”, you would sound like a loon. But how is saying that it’s 45% any better? With balls in an urn, the probability might very well be 45.11782%, and you can prove it. But with humanity landing on Mars, aren’t you just making this number up? Since people on social media have been talking about this again, let’s go over it one more depressing, fruitless time. 1. Probabilities Are Linguistically Convenient I think everyone agrees it’s meaningful and useful to say things like “Humanity probably won’t land on Mars before 2050”. That is, suppose NASA and ESA and SpaceX hire a team of experts to calculate whether they can make it to Mars by 2050. They examine all the evidence and find that going to Mars is much harder than anyone thinks, all the rockets that people plan to use for the task are fatally flawed, and it would take decades to invent better ones. They don’t come up with a mathematical model or form a distribution, they just intuitively notice all these things, and how they add up. When giving her report, the leader of the team says “We don’t think humanity can land on Mars before 2050.” This person hasn’t done anything wrong - it’s impossible to communicate useful information without doing something like this. How unlikely is it? Again, it seems like there might be different degrees of unlikelihood. For example, it might be that it’s pretty hard to make it to Mars by 2050, but with a strong effort and very good luck, we could manage it. Or it might be that it’s insane to even consider that we could make it to Mars by 2050, there are twenty unsolvable problems in the way and everyone who claims to be working on them is a total fraud. So probably the leader of the team should be allowed to say either “It’s pretty unlikely we can make it to Mars by 2050” or “It’s very unlikely we can make it to Mars by 2050.” Suppose she says “it’s very unlikely”. We might still want to know more information. It’s “very unlikely” humans can make it to Pluto by 2050, and also “very unlikely” we can make it to the Andromeda Galaxy by 2050, but these seem like different levels of unlikeliness. You can sort of imagine a scenario where everything goes right and we make it to Pluto, but the Andromeda Galaxy would require totally new science that suspends apparently ironclad physical law. So maybe we need at least two levels of “very unlikely” - one corresponding to the likelihood of getting to Pluto, and one corresponding to the likelihood of getting to Andromeda. We could call these “very unlikely” and “extraordinarily unlikely bordering on impossible”. How many terms like “slightly unlikely”, “very unlikely”, “extraordinarily unlikely”, etc do we need, and how will we make sure that everyone knows what they mean? It seems like having these terms is strictly worse than using a simple percent scale, where the leader of the Mars investigation team says “I think there’s about a 5% chance we can make it to Mars by 2050”. This is obviously clearer than “I think it’s unlikely” and prevents you from having to answer a bunch of followup questions. There are lots of people and space agencies who want to do different things if the chance of making it to Mars is 5% vs. 25%, and collapsing those both under “unlikely” or making people strain to figure out the meaning of “unlikely” vs. “very unlikely” and which one corresponds to 5% vs. 25% feels stupid, like deliberately introducing noise into your communication and asking people to solve a Twenty Questions game before they figure out your true opinion. To put it differently, saying “likely” vs. “unlikely” gives you two options. Saying “very likely”, “somewhat likely”, “somewhat unlikely”, and “very likely” gives you four options. Giving an integer percent probability gives you 100 options. Sometimes having 100 options helps you speak more clearly. A counterargument against doing this might be that it falsely introduces more precision than you can back up. But this isn’t true. Studies find that people who use probabilities often are well-calibrated - ie when they say something is 20% likely, it happens 20% of the time. Other studies find that when superforecasters give a very precise probability (like 23%) the extra digit adds information (ie the thing really does happen closer to 23% of the time than to 20% of the time). In this case, demanding that people stop using probability and go back to saying things like “I think it’s moderately likely” is crippling their ability to communicate clearly for no reason. 2. Probabilities Don’t Describe Your Level Of Information, And Don’t Have To Lots of people seem to think that naming a probability conveys something about how much information you have (eg “How can you say that about such a fuzzy and poorly-understood domain?”). Some people even demand that probabilities come with “meta-probabilities”, an abstruse philosophical concept that isn’t even well-defined outside of certain toy situations. I think it’s easy to prove that none of this is necessary. Consider the following: What’s the probability that a fair coin comes up heads?
Inline links: Other studies find
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.